more information - www.cambridge.org/9781107029385
Inside African Anthropology
Inside African Anthropology offers an incisive biography of the life and
work of South Africa’s foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter
Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in
southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s through a massive personal archive, the book offers insights into the personal and intellectual life of a leading African anthropologist. Beginning with her
origins in the remote Eastern Cape, the authors follow Wilson to Cambridge University and back into the field among the Pondo of South
Africa, where her studies resulted in her 1936 book Reaction to Conquest. Her fieldwork focus then shifted to Tanzania, where she teamed up
with her husband, Godfrey Wilson. She later returned to South Africa
to begin her teaching career at Fort Hare University and record her
Tanzanian research. In the 1960s, Wilson embarked on a new urban
ethnography with a young South African anthropologist, Archie Mafeje,
one of the many black scholars she trained. This study also provides a
meticulously researched exploration of the indispensable contributions
of African research assistants and co-researchers to the production of
this famous woman scholar’s cultural knowledge about mid-twentiethcentury Africa.
Andrew Bank is Associate Professor and head of the History Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has been
commissioning editor of the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories
since 2001 and is a member of the editorial board for the South African
Historical Journal.
Leslie J. Bank is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the
Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Fort
Hare, South Africa. He is the author of Home Spaces, Street Styles:
Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (2011). He is a
member of the editorial board of the International Africa Institute’s
journal, Africa.
Praise for Inside African Anthropology
‘In this provocative engagement with the legacy of Monica Wilson, one of anthropology’s most innovative pioneers, the contributors make a strong case for the
enduring relevance of her scholarly vision – her insistence on the discipline’s relation to history, its unique understanding of ritual and symbolism, its potential for
intimate collaborations across the lines of race, culture, status. In reflecting on
why it is that subsequent generations have not fully appreciated Wilson’s genius,
whether in Africa or beyond, the authors provide sharp insight into what her
story tells us about how anthropology evaluates its own past, about how it often
fails to recognise the many “unofficial” contributors – be they anthropologists or
their various “assistants” – who have enriched its intellectual bounty.’
– Jean Comaroff, Harvard University
‘This book is highly informative on Monica Hunter Wilson, one of the most significant figures in African anthropology, who at great personal and intellectual costs
opted to work from within as apartheid unfolded in South Africa and as some
of her contemporaries relocated to universities in the UK and the United States.
The book makes a compelling case for Monica Wilson’s achievements and stature
as a distinguished and highly regarded ethnographer of social change in Africa;
one who recognised and invested significantly in ethnography as co-production
and co-implication through the close creative relationships she forged and maintained with her fellow African assistants in the course of her career as researcher
and teacher. It is a major and welcome contribution to African anthropology
increasingly in need of new approaches to its intellectual history, ones that show
sensitivity towards processes of inter-dependence, intersubjectivity and reflexivity
in knowledge production.’
– Francis B. Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town
‘This book is among the best written volumes I have read. It uncovers an “unofficial” history of anthropology from South Africa. Each of the authors shows how
anthropology emerges not just as an expression of theory or the genealogy of
its leading figures, but through the unfolding of diverse lives. The most important relationships are between Monica and Godfrey Wilson and the black South
Africans, Zambians, and Tanganyikans who engaged with them as informants,
interpreters and clerks, but also as culture brokers, patrons and intellectuals.
Monica’s liberalism and the context of segregation were always powerful influences, but as a study of lived relationships, Inside African Anthropology reveals the
heterogeneity and negotiation in intellectual work.’
– Nancy Jacobs, Brown University
‘Combining critical intellectual history with biography, the chapters that make up
this fascinating book remind us again that social anthropological scholarship has
always been a “co-production”, no more so than in South Africa during the period
of apartheid. Unusually, among her peers, Monica Wilson always acknowledged
this fact – it was intrinsic to her life’s work as a scholar and dedicated teacher.’
– Megan Vaughan, Cambridge University
Inside African Anthropology
Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters
Edited by
Andrew Bank
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Leslie J. Bank
University of Fort Hare, South Africa
International African Institute, London
and
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107029385
C Cambridge University Press 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Inside African anthropology : Monica Wilson and her interpreters / Andrew
Bank, Leslie J. Bank.
p. cm. – (The international African library)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-02938-5 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Wilson, Monica, 1908–1982. 2. Ethnologists – South Africa –
Biography. 3. Women ethnologists – South Africa – Biography. I. Bank,
Andrew. II. Bank, Leslie John. III. Series: International African library.
GN21.W49I57 2013
306.092–dc23 [B]
2012051626
ISBN 978-1-107-02938-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in
this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Andrew Bank
page ix
xi
xiii
1
Part 1 Pondoland and the Eastern Cape
1 Family, Friends and Mentors: Monica Hunter at
Lovedale and Cambridge, 1908–1930
Andrew Bank
2 The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter
and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern
Cape, 1931–1932
Andrew Bank
3 City Dreams, Country Magic: Re-Reading Monica
Hunter’s East London Fieldnotes
Leslie J. Bank
37
67
95
Part 2 Bunyakyusa
4 Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers: Monica and
Godfrey in Bunyakyusa
Rebecca Marsland
5 Working with the Wilsons: The Brief Career of a
‘Nyakyusa Clerk’ (1910–1938)
Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and
Andrew Bank
129
162
vii
viii
Contents
Part 3 Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town
6 ‘Your Intellectual Son’: Monica Wilson and Her
Students at Fort Hare, 1944–1946
Seán Morrow
193
7 Witchcraft and the Academy: Livingstone Mqotsi,
Monica Wilson and the Middledrift Healers, 1945–1957
Leslie J. Bank
224
8 ‘Speaking from Inside’: Archie Mafeje, Monica Wilson
and the Co-Production of Langa: A Study of Social
Groups in an African Township
Andrew Bank with Vuyiswa Swana
253
Part 4 Legacy
9 ‘Part of One Whole’: Anthropology and History in the
Work of Monica Wilson
Seán Morrow and Christopher Saunders
10 Gleanings and Leavings: Encounters in Hindsight
Pamela Reynolds
Bibliography
Index
283
308
321
347
Figures
P.1 The making of a woman anthropologist: the studious
young Monica Hunter at work in the Stanley Library,
Girton College, c. 1929.
page 35
1.1 A family wedding photograph taken on the front porch
of the Hunter home at Lovedale in 1911.
42
1.2 Monica Wilson aged five. The photograph was taken
during the family visit to England and Scotland in 1913,
a year after the death of her brother.
43
1.3 Monica sent this postcard of Girton to her father with
the comment: ‘This rather jolly view of “Emily Davis
Court” where we play tennis in summer.’
50
1.4 Portrait of Monica dating from her Girton College years.
51
1.5 Monica’s closest friend at Girton College, the Egyptian
nationalist Munira Sadek.
53
1.6 Monica’s long-standing friend, the Communist Party of
South Africa member Eddie Roux in his young days.
54
2.1 The map of Pondoland that featured inside the cover of
the first edition of Reaction to Conquest (1936).
74
2.2 One of only two surviving photos of Monica Hunter in
the field in Pondoland. Given the vegetation the likely
setting is Mbotji and the photographer was therefore
probably Michael Geza, her research assistant in Eastern
Pondoland.
76
2.3 This is a recording of one of the many iintsomi (Xhosa
traditional stories) written for Monica by Michael Geza.
87
2.4 The first of the page-spread features published in the
Illustrated London News of 22 August 1936 in
‘appreciation’ of Reaction to Conquest.
89
3.1 East Bank at the outbreak of the Second World War.
103
3.2 Walter Benson Rubusana around the time he worked
with Monica Hunter in East Bank.
104
3.3 A selection from the hundreds of fieldnotes that Monica
recorded in East London.
109
ix
x
Figures
P.2 A gifted young fieldworker: Monica’s future husband
Godfrey during his first five months of fieldwork in
Bunyakyusa, September 1934 to January 1935.
4.1 Settlement of a dispute. The anthropologist (Godfrey
Wilson) is sitting with the court.
4.2 Monica Wilson taking notes during an interview in
Bunyakyusa, 1955.
4.3 Map of the Rungwe District in Bunyakyusa showing the
three main fieldwork sites of the Wilsons.
4.4 Inside the small house at Isumba that was their
‘principal headquarters’.
4.5 Monica observing Nyakyusa girls washing clothes at the
river.
5.1 Leonard Mwaisumo with his mother and two sisters,
1934.
P.3 Monica’s first graduate student in anthropology, the late
Livingstone Mqotsi (1921–2009) in June 2007.
6.1 Godfrey Wilson during the war.
6.2 Monica and the House Committee of the women’s
residence Elukhanyisweni (Place of Enlightenment) at
Fort Hare Native College, 1946.
6.3 Godfrey Pitje in his later years as a lawyer.
7.1 African Studies Department faculty and senior students,
Fort Hare, 1946.
7.2 A gathering of Eastern Cape healers, East London,
1940.
8.1 Archie Mafeje (left) during his years at Healdtown
Missionary College where he matriculated in 1954.
8.2 Monica (centre) and her colleagues at a
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) Conference in 1951.
8.3 Archie Mafeje (right) in Adderley Street, Cape Town,
with fellow UCT student and anti-apartheid political
activist Welsh Makanda, August 1961.
P.4 Traces in the landscape: the trading store in Ntibane,
Western Pondoland, then and now, the only remaining
traces of Monica Wilson’s presence in the landscapes of
Pondoland and Bunyakyusa.
9.1 Monica Wilson with Leonard and Betty Thompson,
Lake Arrowhead, 1963.
10.1 Monica Wilson at Hunterstoun in the years of her
retirement.
10.2 Monica Wilson on a hike during her retirement, with the
Hogsback in the background.
127
131
132
135
146
153
171
191
196
205
215
233
238
260
261
265
281
293
316
319
Contributors
Andrew Bank is an Associate Professor and head of the History Department at the University of the Western Cape. His main publications are
The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806 to 1834 (1991); Bushmen
in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek–Lloyd Collection of
Bushman Folklore (2006) and (with Keith Dietrich) An Eloquent Picture
Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch,
1863–1865 (2008). He is also the commissioning editor of Kronos: Southern African Histories.
Leslie J. Bank is Professor and Director of the Fort Hare Institute of
Social and Economic Research at the University of Fort Hare in South
Africa. He is the current president of the Anthropology Southern Africa
Association and has published widely in the field of anthropology and
development in southern Africa. His recent publications include Home
Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City
(2011), a major restudy of a classic trilogy in the urban anthropology in
South Africa.
Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wits University. He teaches African, American and
African American history. His research interests include Ndebele ethnicity, the history of radio in South Africa (mainly African-language radio
stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the African
National Congress’s Radio Freedom) and the history of African research
assistants and fieldwork in southern Africa.
Rebecca Marsland is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University
of Edinburgh. She worked in Kyela District, Tanzania, for almost three
years between 2000 and 2009; is currently working on a book called The
Words of the People about tradition, mourning and moral debates among
the Nyakyusa; and is writing further articles about the Wilsons’ fieldwork.
She has also co-edited two volumes on medical anthropology with Ruth
Prince: What Is Life Worth? (special issue of the Medical Anthropology
Quarterly, 2012) and Making Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and
Historical Perspectives (Ohio University Press, 2013).
xi
xii
Contributors
Seán Morrow is Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Fort
Hare and a partner in Ngomso Research, Writing and Editing Service.
Originally a high school teacher, he worked at universities and research
institutions in Ireland, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and South Africa. He
has published on aspects of the educational, religious, liberation and cultural history of Central and southern Africa. He is currently completing
a biography of Monica and Godfrey Wilson.
Timothy Mwakasekele is a project worker in Mental Health and a
Masters student in Public Health at Glasgow Caledonia University in
Edinburgh. He was born in the region where Monica and Godfrey Wilson
did fieldwork in south-west Tanganyika. His interest in the history of
social anthropology developed during a period of five years when he
worked as a translator and research assistant for a social anthropologist
doing fieldwork in this area.
Pamela Reynolds is Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, and
Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town. She is an anthropologist
and has written five books on the ethnography of childhood and youth
in southern Africa. Her most recent book, War in Worcester: Youth and
the Apartheid State, was published in 2013 by Fordham University Press.
She is collaborating with the Department of Social Anthropology at the
University of Cape Town on a project on ‘The Figure of the Child in
Africa’.
Christopher Saunders is Professor Emeritus in the Department of
Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Educated at the universities of Cape Town and Oxford, he worked as a research assistant
for Monica Wilson when she was preparing chapters for the first volume
of The Oxford History of South Africa. His main interests have included
southern African twentieth-century political history and historiography.
He is now a research associate of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in
Cape Town.
Vuyiswa Swana is the younger sister of the late Archie Mafeje. She
worked as a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg until the
late 1960s before serving as a health worker on the Johannesburg City
Council. She and her husband Marshall have three sons and now live in
retirement in Mthatha, Eastern Cape. She maintained close contact with
her brother from shared childhood years in rural Thembuland through
his years in exile and after he had returned to southern Africa in the early
1990s.
Acknowledgements
The essays in this volume are based on many years of collective, and often
collaborative, research on one substantial archival collection, the Monica
and Godfrey Wilson Papers (Wilson Collection). This Collection was
donated by Monica Wilson’s two sons, Francis and Tim, to the Manuscripts and Archives Department of University of Cape Town Libraries
from 1994. This is when the deposits became available to researchers
for the first time. We are grateful to Francis and Tim Wilson for making
these records accessible and for supporting our scholarly project from
the outset. They played an active part in the Monica Wilson Centenary
Conference held between 24 and 26 June 2008 at Hunterstoun in the
Hogsback Mountains of the Eastern Cape, the place of retirement of
Monica Wilson and of their family holiday home which was given over
at this event to the University of Fort Hare as a Creative Writing Centre.
They have kindly given us permission to reproduce the photographic
materials from the Wilson Collection that feature here.
The transfer of the Wilson Collection to UCT Libraries coincided with
the appointment of Lesley Hart as head of the Manuscripts and Archives
Department. Her deep and ongoing sense of commitment to the Collection has been evident from the time that she journeyed to the Hogsback
in 2000 to collect a large body of documents to add to the substantial
collection that had been transferred to UCT a few years earlier. She then
began the long process of sorting these additional papers which Monica had archived in sundry cupboards, bookcases, shelving cabinets and
trunks in the stone building that served as her library. Lesley delivered
these papers by hand to the shelves of the metal sliding cabinets in the
Manuscripts and Archives Department on the ground floor of UCT’s
Oppenheimer Institute Building. She had already spent more than a year
of intensive work compiling the 26-page index to the Collection which
all of the authors in this volume have used as their point of access to the
documents. More than fifteen years later she is still involved in indexing
uncatalogued documents and has overseen the process of digitising the
hundreds of negatives of fieldwork photographs contained in the Wilson
Collection. We owe her a debt of gratitude for these years of labour.
xiii
xiv
Acknowledgements
Isaac Ntabankulu has been the most generous of co-hosts at Manuscripts and Archives, taking an active interest in the research materials of Monica Wilson and effectively acting (for one of the editors at
least) as an informal research assistant over a period of five years. He
has fetched, delivered (and at times uncovered) documents for all the
authors. He has photocopied materials for distribution to authors in
more distant locations; translated sections of Xhosa text recorded by
one of Monica Wilson’s primary research assistants in Western Pondoland; established contacts with friends of Archie Mafeje, her most celebrated anthropological collaborator; and willingly sourced new reviews
of Wilson’s publications. He read the Eastern Cape chapters to check
our Xhosa terms. Janine Dunlop has been another committed and engaging hostess at the Manuscripts and Archives Department over many
years. She has kindly facilitated the process of scanning the visual images
from the Wilson Collection that feature here. Andre Landman and
Marjorie ‘Bobby’ Eldridge have also warmly facilitated our research in
the Manuscripts and Archives Department. Thanks to all of them for
making this research so pleasurable on a daily basis.
In the latter stages of the project, we have benefited from readers’
comments and editorial interventions on successive versions of our draft
manuscript. Deborah James made detailed and incisive comments and
offered enthusiastic support. Two anonymous in-house reviewers, Nancy,
Jacobs and Lyn Schumaker, provided constructive and creative engagement with the draft manuscript. Stephanie Kitchen of the International
African Institute shepherded the manuscript through to publication with
a combination of creative energy and common sense. She has also kindly
made extensive last-minute edits to the book’s Bibliography.
Priscilla Hall deserves special mention for cleaning up a messy document and re-energising the project at a flagging stage. She frog-marched
each of the authors through two rigorous rounds of copyediting conducted under severe time pressure. She has touched up our text at points
too numerous to mention, drafted fine summary paragraphs and kindly
compiled the book’s Bibliography. Mike Kirkwood brought an enthusiasm for the manuscript, an engaging humour and a light touch to our
final round of editing. Gerda Martin takes credit for compiling the Index.
Thanks too to Shana Meyer for her endless patience and skillful work on
layout and design.
Andrew Bank gratefully acknowledges funding from the University
of the Western Cape’s Arts Research Committee and South Africa’s
National Research Foundation for field trips to the Eastern Cape and
south-west Tanzania, and visits to the archives of women anthropologists. These organisations are not of course responsible for the ideas and
arguments presented in his chapters.
Acknowledgements
xv
It would be remiss of us not to acknowledge the authors who have
remained committed to the project, despite lengthy delays and ever fresh
rounds of editorial demands. Seán Morrow, who is himself working on a
biography of Monica and Godfrey Wilson, deserves special mention. He
has been a highly supportive travelling companion into the past. Photographer Rui Assubuji accompanied one of us (Andrew) on field trips in
Pondoland and Bunyakyusa. We are grateful to feature two of his photographs here. It is, ultimately, because of the generous participation of
these authors, and their willingness to engage and re-engage with their
essays, that the book has taken on what we feel is a collective spirit, a sense
of joint endeavour appropriate to its central theme: the co-production of
social scientific knowledge.
Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank
January 2013
Introduction
Andrew Bank
Monica Hunter Wilson (1908–1982) was a prominent figure in that
pioneering generation of social anthropologists who began their careers
during the interwar years.1 South African-born ethnographers played a
leading, perhaps the leading, role in what has nostalgically been called
‘the Golden Age of South African Ethnography’ within the British functionalist tradition.2 Yet her contribution as an anthropologist has been
recognised only partially, mainly because of the narrow retrospective criterion by which intellectual significance has typically been judged.
In the standard narratives significance has been measured almost solely
in relation to ‘theoretical innovation’ in what emerges as a story of stages
of progress. Monica Hunter Wilson did make an important contribution
to anthropological theory. She played a key role in reorienting the functionalist tradition away from the tribal study written in the ethnographic
present towards the study of social change in Africa. Her foremost theoretical text, that short co-authored book The Analysis of Social Change:
Based on Observations in Central Africa – written together with her husband, the anthropologist Godfrey Wilson, and published by Cambridge
University Press in 1945 – was the first study to use ‘social change’ in
its title. Partly because of its theoretical ambition, partly because of its
war-delayed production, it had less impact on theory than its authors had
hoped. It certainly had nothing like the long-term impact of that famous
article in three parts, ‘The Bridge’, that had been published a few years
earlier by her South African-born peer Max Gluckman (1908–1975).
It is his extended ‘analysis of a social situation in Zululand’ that has
come to be recognised as the moment when South African and African
anthropology recognised the need to incorporate coloniser and colonised, European and African, into a wider, and what is now accepted
1
2
Thanks to Paolo Israel, Nancy Jacobs, Deborah James, Seán Morrow, Pamela Reynolds,
Christopher Saunders and Lyn Schumaker for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
Special thanks to my co-editor for detailed commentary and fresh ideas on numerous
draft versions.
W. David Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920–
1990 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001 [1997]), 1.
1
2
Inside African Anthropology
as more modern, ethnographic framework. Gluckman later credited his
one-time mentor Isaac Schapera (1905–2003) as the joint founder of
this ‘one-society school’. I will challenge this androcentric narrative later
in this introduction. For the moment I am interested in making a case
for broadening the criterion by which significance may be judged, and
presenting an argument for seeing Monica Hunter Wilson as an even
more significant figure based on this wider conception.
To begin with, we should note that, like these famous male peers
who worked from Manchester and London respectively in their mature
years, she was an internationally celebrated scholar. Her global reputation was built on an impressive body of ethnographic work on the
Pondo of South Africa and the Nyakyusa of south-west Tanganyika.
Her four highly detailed ethnographies, all discussed below, were published between 1936 and 1959 by Oxford University Press in association
with the International African Institute, and all but the last of these was
reissued. Her best-known monograph remains that ‘precocious’ classic
Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of
South Africa, which first appeared with a glowing foreword by the former
(1919–24) and future (1939–48) South African prime minister Jan Smuts
when she was just 28 years of age.3 Recently it has been republished in a
fourth edition as part of the International African Institute’s ‘Classics in
African Anthropology’ series.4 It has been praised widely over the years,
whether by ‘the founding fathers’ of British functionalism in the interwar years, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown,
leading African nationalists and intellectuals like Oliver Tambo and A. C.
Jordan, or latter-day social historians and novelists in quest of information about the history of African sexuality.5 Jonny Steinberg, for example,
describes it as ‘one of the finest ethnographic monographs ever penned in
South Africa’ and demonstrates the continued relevance of its arguments
about African culture.6
3
4
5
6
‘Precocious’ was the term used by the editors of the festschrift published in honour of
Monica Hunter Wilson after her retirement. See Michael Whisson and Martin E. West,
eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of
Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 3.
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of
South Africa (London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African
Languages and Cultures, 1936; Oxford University Press for the International African
Institute, 1961, 2nd edition; Cape Town: David Philip in associations with Rex Collings,
London, 1979, 3rd edition; Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute,
2009: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition).
Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction
to Conquest (Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African Institute, 2008: Classics
in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition), 1–3.
Jonny Steinberg, The Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey through a Great Epidemic
( Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008), 242. Strictly speaking,
it was typed up in Cambridge in 1933 and reworked in Lovedale in 1934.
Introduction
3
She then published, after an extended delay associated with the tragic
suicide of her husband in May 1944, a celebrated trilogy of monographs
based on some fifty months of joint fieldwork, one of the most extensive
periods in the field on record.7 Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa AgeVillages came out in 1951 and was reissued in an American paperback
second edition in 1963. Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa appeared
in 1957, followed by Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa in 1959, the
former being reissued by Oxford University Press in 1970.8 She also
published at least two dozen articles during these, her most productive
years as an ethnographer.9 Collectively her ethnographic writings made
a substantive contribution to cross-cultural understandings of religion,
ritual, symbolism and social change in both South and Central Africa.
It is no coincidence that it was to Monica Wilson that Victor Turner
dedicated his landmark study of symbolism published some years after
her trilogy.10
She also made a decisive contribution to African history, especially
during her later years (see Chapter 9). International public recognition
came in the form of a Rivers Memorial Medal for Fieldwork awarded by
the Royal Anthropological Society in 1952, a Simon Biesheuvel Medal
for Research granted in 1965, an invitation to deliver the Scott Holland
lectures in Cambridge in 1968 and, in the very last years of her life and
to her great joy, admission to the British Royal Academy.
Our book makes the case that her importance relates as much to the
nature of her engagement with African anthropology ‘from the inside’,
as to the status of her texts within an international scholarly community.
There are three ways in which the following essays recommend that we
should think about Monica Hunter Wilson as a scholar who worked from
‘inside African anthropology’, the description we chose for the book’s
title. First, as highlighted in Chapter 1 (see also Chapters 6 and 9), her
7
8
9
10
This is according to J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Wilson [née Hunter], Monica (1908–1982)’ in Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Thanks to
Rebecca Marsland for alerting me to this reference.
Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York
and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1951;
Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 2nd edition); Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957; London: Oxford University Press, 1970, 2nd edition); Communal Rituals of
the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959). Two
decades later she published a fourth and more historical monograph in the series: Monica Wilson, For Men and Elders: Change in Relations of Generations and of Men and Women
among the Nyakyusa-Ngonde People, 1875–1971 (London and New York: Africana Publishing Company for the International African Institute, 1977).
See Chapter 5 in this collection for a list of her ten articles on the Nyakyusa, and the
Bibliography for other essays.
Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY and
London: Cornell University Press, 1967).
4
Inside African Anthropology
missionary background and schooling gave her a detailed knowledge of an
African language and culture (Xhosa) from her childhood, as she herself
would emphasise in late-life reminiscences where she identified herself, in
the first instance, as ‘a daughter of Lovedale’.11 This set her apart from all
of her contemporaries in the British functionalist tradition, including all
of her South African-born peers (Schapera, Gluckman, Meyer Fortes,
Eileen Krige, Jack Krige, Ellen Hellmann) and Hilda Kuper (born in
Bulawayo).
Second, Monica made a courageous decision to work as an anthropologist from within Africa with the coming of apartheid. This was, as
Seán Morrow shows in Chapter 6, despite numerous highly prestigious
job offers abroad, including approaches from Oxford and Cambridge.
Her conscious choice to live and work as a social anthropologist committed to political change from within a country whose oppressive racially
structured system of government made it a pariah state did have serious implications for her career. There is little doubt that she often felt
an intense sense of intellectual isolation and that she would have gained
much by relocating and becoming more closely integrated into the emerging international scholarly community of social anthropologists – as,
say, Max Gluckman did when he took a post at Manchester University
in the late 1940s, or as Isaac Schapera did when he took a position at
the University of London in 1950, or as Hilda Kuper did when she left
South Africa to take up a post at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) in 1963.12
The costs were personal as well as intellectual, something that tends
to get obscured in the reminiscences of her former students who have
been wont to present her as something of an Iron Lady, a woman fighting
prejudice, intellectual sloppiness and bureaucratic inefficiency with stern
and often steely demeanour. I am equally struck by the image of a vulnerable Monica Wilson presented by one of her many close friends from
her undergraduate years at Girton College, Muriel Bradbrook, who had
also enjoyed an impressive career as a writer and academic. Bradbrook
remembered her friend, most of all, for the depth of her commitment to
human rights in Africa, reflecting that she was ‘too sensitive to be called
fearless’ and remembered that, ‘When in the seventies she stayed with me
[in Cambridge], I could hear her crying out in her sleep very pitifully’.13
11
12
13
Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique
Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press,
1973), 6.
Significantly, her women peers, Eileen Krige and Ellen Hellmann (and Hilda Kuper for
a time) did remain in South Africa during the apartheid era, but they did not have quite
the same international recognition.
Transcript of a recording of Muriel Bradbrook, 1989, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, on the theme of ‘Strong-minded Dons’. On her commitment to human rights
Introduction
5
Third, and this is the burden of our case, she was a highly skilled collaborator, one who forged close, creative relationships with African research
assistants and African researchers throughout her career as a researcher
and teacher. These relationships began during her intense decade of
fieldwork in the 1930s, first in Pondoland and East London, then in
Bunyakyusa. Here her experiences were not too different from those of
her peers who did fieldwork in southern and Central Africa around this
time. They too forged close relationships with African interpreters in
the field as Lyn Schumaker has forcefully demonstrated in the case of
Max Gluckman in his later years as director of the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute (RLI) in Northern Rhodesia.14
It is her relationships with African students at Fort Hare Native College
and the University of Cape Town (UCT) – the dimension of her work that
we explore in Part 3 of this volume – that make her contribution arguably
more unusual. It has long been recognised that she was a dedicated and
highly successful teacher, training new generations of social anthropologists and social scientists in southern Africa. Her mentorship is associated
especially with her extended period as chair of the Social Anthropology
Department and head of the School of African Studies at UCT between
1952 and 1973. The talented students whom she trained during these
decades included, in roughly chronological order, Berthold Pauw, Max
Marwick, Peter Carstens, Peter Rigby, Archie Mafeje, Jean Comaroff,
John Comaroff and Martin West. After her retirement she supervised
Colin Murray and Pamela Reynolds, author of the concluding chapter
of this volume. Her impact went well beyond social anthropology, as her
son Francis, a highly respected and influential economist on whom she
had a deep and lasting intellectual impact, has recently noted: ‘There
were archaeologists, including Glynn Isaacs and Carmel Schrire; lawyers
such as Godfrey Pitje and Fikile Bam; theologians such as Axel-Iva Berglund; and many others, including, informally, Victor Turner and Rhys
Isaacs.’15
The influence that we track most closely, however, is her role as a
trainer of, and collaborator with, young black anthropologists. She played
a hitherto unrecognised role in fostering what might be described as a
vibrant insider ethnographic tradition in South African anthropology of
the mid-twentieth century, one which developed during a period in which
14
15
see also James G. Ellison, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: Anthropology and Social Justice’ in
Monica Wilson, Reaction to Conquest (Berlin: LIT on behalf of the International African
Institute, 2008: Classics in African Anthropology Series, 4th edition), 26–49.
Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research
at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Richard Handler, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 91–130.
Francis Wilson, ‘An Appreciation’, 19.
6
Inside African Anthropology
African anthropology more generally was highly cosmopolitan.16 It is in
uncovering these collaborative relationships with African researchers –
most notably Godfrey Pitje, Livingstone Mqotsi and Archie Mafeje – and
the sometimes hidden ethnographies that were produced from them, that
our study most profoundly challenges the sometimes essentialised retrospective construction of ‘colonial anthropology’ as the products of white
outsiders studying African subjects. What these in-depth case studies
of collaboration reveal, with their detailed attention to the complexities
of social relationships and identities inside African anthropology during
successive phases of the career of a single anthropologist, is that cultural
knowledge production was much more complex than simple dualistic
models allow. It is too often assumed that the standard format of the
functionalist ethnographic study and the colonial contexts in which they
were carried out implies that social anthropologists did broadly similar
things in broadly similar ways in producing knowledge about bounded
African ‘tribes’. What these case studies demonstrate is that Monica
Hunter Wilson was just one of a wide cast of characters working from
‘inside African anthropology’ in Pondoland, Bunyakyusa, Middledrift
and Langa across three decades, and that there was an enormous diversity
of practice and approach, of subject positions and points of entry into the
discipline – in all, a complex range of motivations and forms of dialogue
about culture. The extent of African involvement and the complexity
of these social identities and relationships question the utility of catchall conceptual categories like ‘colonial anthropology’ or ‘anthropology’s
hidden colonialism’.17
Our book thus seeks to strike a balance between, on the one hand, a
rigorous and much fuller archivally based reassessment of the scholarly
contribution of a woman who was possibly the most significant South
African-born social anthropologist of the twentieth century and, on the
other, uncovering for the first time the life histories and intellectual contributions of a succession of African ‘interpreters’ (broadly defined) who
worked with her ‘inside African anthropology’. This concept developed
out of a centenary conference on Monica Hunter Wilson held between
24 and 26 June 2008 in the Hogsback, Eastern Cape. The conference
16
17
For an evocative sense of this cosmopolitanism, see Mwenda Ntarangwi, David Mills
and Mustafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London:
Zed Books, 2006). Other African anthropologists associated with this insider tradition
include Z. K. Matthews and Absolom Vilakazi, both of whom are mentioned in later
chapters.
Roger Sanjek, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and Their Ethnographers’, Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (1993), 13–18. I have changed my own view of such concepts in relation to thinking about Hunter Wilson’s research since publishing Andrew
Bank, ‘The “Intimate Politics” of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932’, Journal of Southern African Studies,
34, 3 (2008), 557–574.
Introduction
7
brought together generations of her former students, from the late Livingstone Mqotsi, the first student researcher whose work she supervised
in the mid-1940s, to Pamela Reynolds, who worked with her on a doctoral study in the last years of Monica’s life. The conference was opened
by the highly lucid 86-year-old Mqotsi, who offered a moving tribute to
the woman who had been his mentor all those years ago. Having passed
through many phases of a life in politics and education within and beyond South Africa (see Chapter 7), he spoke most eloquently of how he
had come to appreciate the profound impact that Wilson had exerted
on his intellectual development from his first year at Fort Hare Native
College.
The conference also showcased the work of different generations of
scholars, most of whom are historians or anthropologists, who were
involved in a sustained and ongoing engagement with the documents
contained in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers (Wilson Collection) at UCT. Before revealing some of the riches in this collection and
explaining its history, I reflect on the recent upsurge of scholarly interest
in the concept of the interpreter in African studies, on the ways in which
our book seeks to challenge the standard male-dominated narrative about
the history of anthropology in South Africa referred to above, and on the
specific contribution that each of the chapters makes to furthering understanding of the collaborative relationships forged by one woman scholar
inside anthropology in South and Central Africa.
The Interpreters
Our inclusive use of the concept of ‘the interpreter’ takes its cue from a
public lecture that Monica delivered in Grahamstown in 1972, the year
before her retirement. She began by pointing out that the first interpreters in the southern region of our continent were Africans, not colonists.
These were the bilingual Christian converts who had learnt literacy and
communicative skills on mission stations and then worked as translators.
On the mission station of Lovedale where she grew up, there were generations of such interpreters in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
They included Jan Tzatzoe, Tiyo Soga and ‘the next generation [who]
came from Fingo families, men like the Jabavus and Makiwanes – but
there were also Xhosa proper like John Knox Bokwe and other Sogas
besides the original Tiyo, who were orators and writers in both English
and Xhosa.’18
Social anthropologists and missionaries were the heirs of these
African interpreters, with their concern ‘to mediate ideas, law, custom,
18
Monica Wilson, ‘The Interpreters’, Third Dugmore Memorial Lecture (Grahamstown:
1820 Settlers National Monument Foundation, 1972), 8–9.
8
Inside African Anthropology
symbolism’. In her view the ‘essential qualities’ of the ‘true interpreter’
were the ability to listen and to ‘establish trust’ in conditions of underlying suspicion (see also Chapter 10). Youth could be an advantage. She
then pointed to recent anthropological studies in Africa and beyond that
had explored the role of intermediate individuals and social groups. Here
she mentioned work on headmen in Central Africa by the scholars of the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), the studies in Mexico by the sociologist Eric Wolf and his coining of the concept of the ‘cultural broker’, as
well as Clifford Geertz’s research on Muslim teachers in Javanese villages
who acted as mediators between the local and the outside world.19 She
also mentioned the ‘brilliant’ work of Elizabeth Colson on patron–client
relations in Zambia, suggesting that the ‘patrons’ in her study resembled
‘cultural brokers’.20 Women played an important role as mediators, especially in South Africa where many were employed as domestic servants.21
This interest in intercultural and interpersonal relations was unfashionable in southern African studies of the later 1970s and 1980s, but there
has been an explosion of literature on interpreters during the last decade.
The first of her cast to attract renewed attention were British missionaries.
Here the work of her former students Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff
on missionaries working among the Tswana, published in 1991, provided
one of the fullest attempts to apply anthropological concepts to the missionary encounter in southern Africa.22 The work of social anthropologists as interpreters came under increasing scrutiny in the wake of
anthropology’s self-reflexive turn, and the history of social anthropology
has now emerged as a dynamic subfield in southern African studies.
This literature has a biographical slant, partly because the main source
materials are either monographs or private papers of individual anthropologists. Patrick Harries’s incisive analyses of the intellectual milieu and
interpretations of Tsonga culture by the Swiss missionary ethnographer
Henri Alexandre Junod (1863–1934) and his peers is the closest we have
come to ‘anthropological biography’,23 a field that has long flourished
19
20
21
22
23
See Max Gluckman, J. Clyde Mitchell and John A. Barnes, ‘The Village Headman in
British Central Africa’, Africa, 19, 2 (1949), 89–106; Lloyd Fallers, ‘The Predicament
of the Modern African Chief: An Instance from Uganda’, American Anthropologist, 57,
2 (1955), 290–305; Eric R. Wolf, ‘Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society:
Mexico’, American Anthropologist, 53, 6 (1956); Clifford Geertz, ‘The Javanese Kijaji:
The Changing Role of a Cultural Broker’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2,
2 (1960), 228–249.
For a recent collection of essays reappraising and revisiting the work of Elizabeth Colson,
see Chet Lancaster and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds, The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia
and Zimbabwe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America).
Monica Wilson, ‘Interpreters’, 14.
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism,
and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press,
1991). See also Vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (1997).
Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge
in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007);
Introduction
9
in the United States in particular.24 Other recent scholarship has dealt
with late-nineteenth-century ethnographic research in the region with
extensive literatures on the Zulu cultural studies of the Natal government
administrator and oral historian James Stuart and his research assistants25
and on the /Xam and !Kung collaborative research of Wilhelm Bleek and
Lucy Lloyd.26 There have also been detailed studies of missionary and
official government ethnography,27 the complex and changing role of
24
25
26
27
Patrick Harries, ‘Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Entomology, Botany and the Early
Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H. A. Junod’ in Saul Dubow, ed., Science and
Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11–39.
The bibliography of book-length biographies of American anthropologists is a long
one. To give a selection of recent biographies of female anthropologists, see Nancy
C. Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton, NJ and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008); V. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life
of Zora Neale Hurston (London: Virago Press, 2003); R. Fardon, Mary Douglas: An
Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 1999); Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); for
earlier autobiographies of women anthropologists, see Hortense Powdermaker, Stranger
and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1972); the essays in Peggy Golde, ed., Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1970). For an edited collection of biographies of women
anthropologists internationally, see Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre and Ruth
Weinberg, eds, Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Greenwood, 1988) and in a regional context, see Nancy J. Parezo, ed., Hidden Scholars:
Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). Autobiographies and biographies of anthropologists
in the British tradition are thinner on the ground; for an inspirational biography of
the early years of Bronislaw Malinowski, see Michael W. Young, Malinowski: Odyssey
of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press,
2004).
Colin Webb and John Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Evidence Relating
to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, vols. 1–6 (Pietermaritzburg: Natal
University Press, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 2001, 2012); Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific
Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cape Town:
David Philip, 1998), Chapter 4; Ben Carton, ‘Fount of Culture: Legacies of the “James
Stuart Archive” in South African Historiography’, History in Africa, 30 (2003), 87–106;
Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’,
History in Africa, 38 (2011), 319–342; John Wright, ‘Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an
Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903’, History in Africa, 38
(2011), 343–368.
Andrew Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek–Lloyd
Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006); Pippa Skotnes, ed.,
Claim to the Country (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007). For a recent intellectual
biography of Wilhelm Bleek’s daughter Dorothea Frances Bleek, see Jill Weintroub,
‘A Working Life: The Linguistic and Rock Art Research of Dorothea Frances Bleek
(1873–1948)’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2010). A
conference entitled ‘The Courage of //Kabbo’ at the University of Cape Town in August
2011 pointed to the continued dynamism of the Bleek-Lloyd-San studies.
David Maxwell, ‘The Soul of the Luba: W. F. P. Burton, Missionary Ethnography and Belgian Colonial Science’, History and Anthropology, 19, 4 (2008), 325–
351; Ann Wanless, ‘The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of
Khoisan Ethnologica’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand,
2007).
10
Inside African Anthropology
photography in the construction of anthropological knowledge,28 and
the highly productive cultures of work that developed at anthropological
research institutes, notably the RLI in Central Africa, but also the East
African Institute for Social Research at Makerere University.29
The ‘Official’ History of Anthropology in South Africa
It is no surprise that the ‘official’ history has been overwhelmingly maledominated. This applies not only to physical anthropology, where women
were on the margins,30 but to social anthropology, a discipline in which
they played a central if not leading role in the region. The bias is well illustrated by the way the influential standard overview, David HammondTooke’s Imperfect Interpreters, creates its canon.31 The founder figure in
this official version is that author’s former supervisor Isaac Schapera, who
had been trained by the two ‘founding fathers’ of British functionalism,
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who ‘established’ the discipline of social anthropology in South Africa during his five years at UCT between 1921 and
1925, and Bronislaw Malinowski, whose seminars Schapera had attended in London between 1926 and 1928.32 Schapera developed the new
discipline when he took up a post initially as a researcher and then in 1934
28
29
30
31
32
Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes, eds, The Colonising Camera:
Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Press; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998); John L. Comaroff, Jean Comaroff
and Deborah James, eds, Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac
Schapera (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007); see also Rui C. de N. Assubuji,
‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Monica Hunter Wilson’s Photographs in
Pondoland and Bunyakyusa, 1931–1938’ (unpublished M.A. mini-thesis, University of
the Western Cape, 2010).
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the
Zambian Copperbelt (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
2001); Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘Researching and Writing in the Twilight of an Imagined Conquest: Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–1960’, History and Anthropology, 18,
4 (2007), 459–487; David Mills, ‘How Not to Be a “Government House Pet”: Audrey
Richards and the East African Institute for Social Research’ in Mwenda Ntarangwi,
David Mills and Muftafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2006), 76–98.
For an all-male cast of physical anthropologists and their contribution to scientific racism
in twentieth-century South Africa, see Saul Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in
Modern South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995).
W. David Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists, 1920–
1990 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001 (1997), 2nd edition). His
analysis of the contribution of women scholars in a field in which women were very well
represented is effectively confined to one out of the book’s nine chapters (Chapter 3:
The ‘Great Tradition’: The Ethnographic Monograph) and no more than twenty of the
190 pages in the main text (Agnes Winifred Hoernlé, 35–38; Monica Hunter Wilson,
77–83; Eileen Krige with Jack Krige, 84–87; Hilda Kuper, 88–90; Ellen Hellmann,
143–144; Mia Brandel-Syrier, 155).
The classic text setting out the case for the theoretical revolution of these two founding
fathers of British functionalism is Adam Kuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The
Introduction
11
as professor and head of social anthropology at UCT. He was effectively
the pioneer fieldworker there, as his first field trip to Mochudi dates to
October of 1929, and he continued to revisit his field-site during university vacations across two decades. Winifred Hoernlé’s earlier fieldwork
in the Northern Cape and German South-West Africa in 1912–13 and
1923, as well as her thoroughly collaborative work with Radcliffe-Brown
in the 1922–25 years, get short shrift.33
Schapera’s Tswana monographs of the 1930s and 1940s are seen to
have set the bar for ethnographic work in the region. He is also identified
as the central figure in the institutional development of social anthropology, given his role as leader and mediator of the Inter-University
Committee for African Studies founded in 1932 that served as a bridge
between English and Afrikaans ethnographic traditions in South Africa.
Above all though, he led the breakaway from the narrow ‘tribal’ model
of Malinowski by insisting on the inclusion in anthropological research
of ‘the missionary, trader and administrator’, along with ‘the chief and
the magician’. The South African male anthropologists’ volte-face on
theory was taken forward by Max Gluckman, who, as noted above, credited Schapera as his main source of inspiration.34 Gluckman’s famous
series of essays on the building of a bridge in Zululand has been seen
as the symbolic moment when the island-based functionalist model was
laid to rest.35 Gluckman also later revolutionised the understanding of
group identity by shifting the focus, along with his Jewish male colleagues
Abner Cohen, Clyde Mitchell and A. L. Epstein, from an older, bounded
cultural concept of ‘tribe’ to a modern and still current one of ‘ethnicity’
33
34
35
British School, 1922–1972 (London: Routledge, 1973). Henrika Kuklick makes a persuasive case for W. H. R. Rivers having a stronger claim to the title. Henrika Kuklick,
‘Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference
to Sociocultural Anthropology’, Isis, 102, 1 (2011), 1–33.
For an alternative view of Hoernlé’s contribution to fieldwork and anthropological
theory, see Peter Carstens, ‘Introduction’ in Peter Carstens, Gerald Klinghardt and
Martin West, Trails in the Thirstland: The Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernlé (Cape Town:
UCT African Studies Centre, 1987), 1–15; for an account showing the changes and
ambiguities in Hoernlé’s racial views, see Kelly Gillespie, ‘“Containing the Wandering
Native”: Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South
Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37, 3 (2011), 499–515.
See Max Gluckman, ‘Anthropology and Apartheid: The Work of South African Anthropologists’ in Meyer Fortes and Sheila Patterson, eds, Studies in African Anthropology:
Essays Presented to Professor Schapera (London, New York and San Francisco, CA: Academic, 1975), 21–40. See also the essay in this collection by Meyer Fortes, ‘Isaac
Schapera: An Appreciation’, 1–6.
For a powerful case, see his three-part essay ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’ published in Bantu Studies between 1940 and 1942, ‘a landmark in
South African social studies and the foundation text of what later became known as
the Manchester School of Social Anthropology’. See Hugh Macmillan, ‘Return to the
Malungwana Drift: Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation and the Common Society’, African
Affairs, 94 (1995), 39–65; Max Gluckman, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Zululand’,
Bantu Studies, 14 (1940), 1–30; 147–174; ‘Some Processes of Social Change Illustrated
from Zululand’, African Studies [formerly Bantu Studies], 1 (1942), 243–260.
12
Inside African Anthropology
in which identities were seen as fluid and situational.36 These were the
two primary contributions from South Africa to the British functionalist
tradition.
The official story goes on to tell of how English and Afrikaner traditions of anthropological writing diverged with political change in southern Africa and especially with the coming of apartheid. Isaac Schapera
left and a generation of young scholars, black and white, followed his
example. Within South Africa the volkekundige [tribal studies] tradition
flourished at Afrikaans universities and served as ideological justification
for apartheid. This too was an emphatically male-dominated field. Here
the main figures were Nicholas van Warmelo of the Native Affairs Department, who began his work in the interwar years,37 and then Werner
Eiselen, whose anthropological research would later become tailored to
apartheid racial ideology. The tradition was developed by Eiselen’s male
students: P. J. Schoeman and P. J. Coertze, and then his son R. D.
Coertze.38 Even the growth of new branches of social anthropological
research at English universities in South Africa in the second half of
the twentieth century is associated almost exclusively with the work of
men, notably the urban anthropology of Philip Mayer and the Marxist
influenced exposé anthropology of John Sharp and Andrew Spiegel.
An ‘Unofficial’ History of Anthropology in South
and Central Africa
Our study might be read then as a sounding into the ‘unofficial’ history of anthropology in South and Central Africa. We borrow this
concept from Louise Lamphere’s presidential address at the 100th American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington in December
2001.39 Lamphere used the occasion to reflect on how and why new
generations of social anthropologists revise their history. ‘Whose work
gets taught and how it is connected to other traditions is critical in the
36
37
38
39
Hugh Macmillan, ‘From Race to Ethnic Identity: South Central Africa, Social Anthropology and the Shadow of the Holocaust’, Social Dynamics: Special Issue: Essays in
Commemoration of Leroy Vail, 26, 2 (2000), 87–115.
For a case study of van Warmelo’s relationships with the African interpreters who
gathered the texts on which he based his tribally-ordered ethnographies, see Sekibakiba
Peter Lekgoathi, ‘“Colonial” Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making
of an Archive of the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, Journal of African History, 50
(2009), 61–80. See Chapter 5, this volume.
For an early essay on the volkekundige tradition, see Robert Gordon, ‘Apartheid’s
Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 15,
3 (1988), 535–552; for a recent history of the intellectual development of Werner
Eiselen, see Cynthia Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education
(Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010).
Louise Lamphere, ‘Unofficial Histories: A Vision of Anthropology from the Margins’,
American Anthropologist, 106, 1 (2004), 126–139.
Introduction
13
shaping of anthropology for the next generation.’ She presents a powerful
case for the creative contribution of women and minorities to the history
of social anthropology in the United States through the transformation
of field research, the evolution of more dialogic forms of ethnographic
writing, and the links they established between anthropology and political
or social activism.40 Where Lamphere could identify 25 years of scholarship on women and minorities in the United States, which we can now
extend to 35 years, fuller recognition of the contributions of women and
African scholars in southern Africa anthropology is in its infancy.
We highlight the role played by one woman. A wider-reaching ‘unofficial’ history would have to include a reappraisal of Monica Wilson’s marginalised peers including Winifred Hoernlé, Eileen Krige, Hilda Kuper
and Ellen Hellmann,41 a fuller recognition of the collaborative contributions of Iona Mayer, a systematic reassessment of the contribution of
Audrey Richards and of the longest-living anthropologist of their generation, Elizabeth Colson, and also of the work of subsequent generations
of women anthropologists in the region – as well as the hidden ethnographies of the African ethnographers, some of whose works we bring to
the fore here.
Lyn Schumaker has drawn attention to ‘the feminisation of social
anthropology’ in the interwar years. She argues that: ‘In many ways the
history of anthropology in the twentieth century has been the story of
women’s entry into the discipline and the interaction of this phenomenon
with anthropology’s defining methodological moment, the emergence of
participant observation fieldwork.’42 She points out that women opened
up significant new fields of research which, in the case of Africa, included
Audrey Richards’s work on nutrition, beginning in 1930. She urges us
to pay attention not only to women’s ethnographies, but especially to
their contributions to changing fieldwork practice. Once we explore, in
a closely historicised way, the ongoing constructions of knowledge about
African cultures at the field-sites themselves, there will be a clearer sense
of the methodological contributions of women in the development of the
discipline. The ways in which we do this in relation to one leading woman
researcher are explained in the subsection below.
40
41
42
Ibid., 126.
There are recent signs of interest in reappraising their works but only in relation to
specific aspects rather than in general overview: for a reading of the later fictional writing
of Hilda Kuper as protest literature, see Kerry Vincent, ‘Literature as Laboratory: Hilda
Kuper’s Factional Representations of Swaziland’, African Studies, 70, 1 (2011), 89–111;
for an argument on the contribution of Ellen Hellmann’s ethnographic photographs of
Rooiyard and Johannesburg townships, see Marijke du Toit, ‘The General View and
Beyond: From Slum-Yard to Township in Ellen Hellmann’s Photographs of Women
and the African Familial in the 1930s’ in Patricia Hayes, ed., Gender and History, 17, 3
(Special Issue: Gender and Visuality) (2005), 593–626.
Lyn Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field in the Twentieth Century: Revolution, Involution,
Devolution?’ in Henrika Kuklick, ed., A New History of Anthropology (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2008), 277–293.
14
Inside African Anthropology
Our study takes seriously her recommendation in that pathbreaking
social history of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central
Africa, that we think of social anthropology as a practical activity in cultural contact zones, as the many things that anthropologists – in our
case Monica Wilson and her interpreters – do when in the field. These
activities include not just the main business of negotiating, interviewing and recording, but all manner of mundane, everyday matters from
organising domestic space (whether tent or house) to the personal, sometimes even ‘intimate’, conversations with employees, research assistants
or informants. This ‘view from the tent’43 heightens our appreciation
of the experiential aspects of anthropological research and the extent
to which Africans contributed to what she terms ‘the co-production of
scientific knowledge’.44
Schumaker questions the appropriateness of Sanjek’s concept of
‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’,45 something that is taken up in
Chapter 2 of this collection, an essay on Monica’s research relationships
in Pondoland in 1931 and 1932 that I had published in 2008 and that
we decided to republish here (Chaper 2) despite my changing view of the
utility of the concept. She rightly argues that ‘a simple model of exploitation’ fails to take enough account of the ‘assistants’ own agency in fieldwork’, of their own motivations, something which other recent scholars
have evocatively termed their side in ‘the bargain of collaboration’.46 Our
preference has been to acknowledge that there are a range of terms which
can be used in different cases and contexts. These include the catchall terms like ‘interpreter’ and ‘intermediary’, more formal descriptions
like ‘research assistant’ and ‘researcher’, and those concepts like ‘indigenous anthropologist’ and ‘intellectual’ that make greater claims for
contribution.
43
44
45
46
Lyn Schumaker, ‘A Tent with a View: Colonial Officers, Anthropologists, and the
Making of the Field in Northern Rhodesia, 1937–1960’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 237–258.
For an excellent critique of the general concept of ‘colonial science’ based on a case
for the complexity of colonial knowledge production in mid-twentieth century tropical
Africa across a wide range of fields, see Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory:
Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a case for complexity, though
here with particular attention to diverse European traditions rather than the extent
of internal critique of colonialism within the British tradition, see Helen Tilley with
Robert Gordon, eds, Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics
of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 1–22; 227–259.
Roger Sanjek, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and Their Ethnographers’, Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (1993), 13–18.
Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 12–13; Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn
and Robert L. Roberts, ‘Introduction’ in Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
Introduction
15
Our investigation of African interpreters working with Monica should
also be read in relation to the emerging genre of biographies of African
interpreters. Megan Vaughan’s work on the writings of Kenneth Mdala,
a Yao ‘native clerk’ from Malawi, has obvious resonance here. There is
little doubt that Monica and Godfrey Wilson and their first Nyakyusa
research assistant Leonard Mwaisumo (whose biography and research
contribution to the Wilsons is detailed in Chapter 5) would have known
Mdala in his years between 1916 and 1943, when he worked as a clerk
at the government boma [administrative centre] in Tukuyu. She shows
how he tirelessly promoted the ethnic claims of a Yao lineage within the
newly instituted system of indirect rule. His outpourings on the subject
unsettled even the British colonial officials who read his missives. But
Vaughan also locates this idiosyncratic life story within a deep history of
the region. She demonstrates that Mdala, while so unusual on one level,
was but one among a generation of young men trained in Nyasaland
who migrated through the region and used their literacy to promote their
ambitions.47
A biographical approach towards the activities of ‘native clerks’ and
other African ‘middle men’ is applied in colonial contexts across Africa
in the volume of essays edited by Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Osborn and
Richard Roberts entitled Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African
Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa. They make a forceful collective case for the significance of the hidden story of African employees
in the colonial administration of Africa. Colonial rule in Africa went beyond ‘the thin white line’, that surface scattering of white officialdom. It
was for the most part the work of ‘a vast cohort’ of African ‘collaborators’, a term they recast in relation to the concept of bargaining.48 The
essays develop this general theme in relation to particular careers and
life histories. Roger Levine’s essay – on a nineteenth-century evangelist
rather than an administrator – analyses the translation work and cultural
negotiations of the Xhosa man-between Jan Tzatzoe, who served as an
interpreter for successive missionaries on the Cape’s eastern frontier and
was mentioned in Monica Wilson’s 1972 Grahamstown lecture. In his
book-length study Levine goes on to make a case for Tzatzoe’s articulation of a distinctively African theology in his work of translating biblical
47
48
Megan Vaughan, ‘Mr Mdala Writes to the Governor: Negotiating Colonial Rule in
Nyasaland’, History Workshop, 60, 1 (2005), 171–189. For a fascinating collection of
essays on ‘tin-trunk literacy’, the proliferation of non-elite African writings and texts
produced in anglophone Africa in the early to mid-twentieth century, see Karin Barber,
ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington and
Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); for an excellent case study of the
importance of writing and successive contests over texts in the construction of Gikuyu
political identities, see Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping,
and the Work of the Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004).
Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks.
16
Inside African Anthropology
texts and during his evangelical tour of Britain during the mid-1830s.49
Emily Osborn’s essay explores the translations and mistranslations of
African interpreters in the administration of French West Africa through
a series of regional case studies: Ousmane Fall in Medine in the French
Soudan, Lassana Oulare in Siguiri in French Guinea and Kamissoko in
Kankan in French Guinea. She uses these case studies to highlight the
limitations of colonial control and makes a persuasive case for renewed
attention to local agency in knowledge production,50 an argument with
obvious relevance to our study.
Where Vaughan and Osborn present biographies of government officials (and Levine that of a native evangelist), Nancy J. Jacobs adopts a
biographical approach towards the fieldwork of African research assistants in a sense that is most directly analogous to the social scientific
knowledge production that we examine in this study. Jacobs combines
a keen interest in the individual with a refreshing openness to concepts
developed in the wider field of the history of science. In a series of articles that present case studies of particular cross-racial collaborations
at ornithological field-sites in twentieth-century Africa, she foregrounds
what she terms the ‘intimate politics’ of knowledge. For Jacobs ‘intimacy’
refers not only to the common-sense meaning of sexual feelings and/or
behaviour, like the ‘same-sex longings’ that the West African ornithologist George Latimer Bates felt towards his Bulu research assistants, but
to an ‘encompassing field of affective sociality’.51 Jacobs insists on the
importance of power relations, arguing that the racially structured nature
of colonial societies in early-mid-twentieth century Africa ensured that
such intimacies always needed to be negotiated, managed or ‘policed’,
49
50
51
See Roger S. Levine, A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Colonial Encounter in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2011); Hlonipha Mokoena, Magema Fuze: The Making
of a Kholwa Intellectual (Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2011). For a
rare exploration of a female cultural broker in South African historiography, see Vertrees C. Malherbe, Krotoa or Eva: A Woman Between (Cape Town: Centre for African
Studies, 1991); R. Ross, ‘Hermanus Matroos, aka Ngxukumeshe: A Life on the Border’
in Andrew Bank and Leslie J. Bank, eds, Kronos: Journal of Cape History (Special Issue:
Eastern Cape), 30 (Nov. 2004), 47–69. For a dynamic new literature on the prolific literary activities and output of Zulu converts from Bishop William Colenso’s Ekukhanyeni
(‘Place of Light’) mission station near Pietermaritzburg, see V. Khumalo, ‘Ekhukhanyeni
Letter-Writers: A Historical Inquiry into Epistolary Network(s) and Political Imagination in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa’ in Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories,
113–142. For an incisive, self-reflexive biography by a South African anthropologist of
his late research assistant ‘Jimmy Mohale’ (1969–2005), see Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft
and a Life in the New South Africa (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press for the International African Institute, 2013).
The essay was first published as Emily Osborn, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial
Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of
African History, 44, 1 (2003), 29–50.
She adopts this phrase from Hugh Raffles, ‘Intimate Knowledge’, International Social
Science Journal, 54, 3 (2002), 325–335.
Introduction
17
and explores the contrasting ways that individual ornithologists attempted to do this.52
In another essay she contrasts ‘the politics of intimacy’ with the politics of acknowledgment, and my Pondoland essay (Chapter 2) draws on
both of these concepts. A broad survey of ornithological texts reveals
that far from ‘simple erasure’, as Sanjek would have it, there is rather
a ‘continuum of acknowledgement [of African research assistants] from
anonymity to the briefly mentioned assistants, for example in concluding words of appreciation, or the naming of a bird after an assistant
unmentioned in the narrative, to those named as important contributors yet about whom we know little as people, to a handful of men who
are recognisable individuals with specific characteristics and characters.’
In exploring three individual research assistants in the latter category –
Salimu Asmani of Tanzania, Njeru Kicho of Kenya and Jali Makawa of
Malawi and Zambia – she presents a powerful case for foregrounding the
motivations of these research assistants themselves, in the same way that
Vaughan compels our attention to how Mdala himself (rather than others) conceived of his intellectual work. Asmani, Kicho and Makawa were,
she argues, ‘servants to science’ with their own ‘motivations, affections,
predelictions, sensitivities and sense of self ’.53
The Contribution of Hunter Wilson and Her Interpreters
How does this book challenge ‘the official history’ and contribute to the
genre of interpreter biographies discussed above? The opening chapter
provides the biographical context for the book’s subsequent analyses of
Monica Hunter Wilson’s research and research collaborations. Following
an approach towards the history of anthropology that gives due importance to personal factors,54 I explore her missionary origins and Lovedale
schooling, and make a case for the under-acknowledged influence of her
undergraduate years at Cambridge University between 1927 and 1930 in
shaping her subsequent career. I propose that her decision to switch from
history to social anthropology in the middle of her undergraduate degree
was associated with her immersion in a dynamic Labour Study Circle led
by the South African Communist Party member Eddie Roux. I then argue
that her Cambridge lecturers in the still unfashionable subject of social
anthropology, especially her doctoral thesis supervisor Thomas Callan
Hodson, were more influential in shaping her background knowledge
52
53
54
Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 48, 3 (2006), 564–603.
Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘Servants to Science: African Assistants in Twentieth-Century Ornithology’ (unpublished seminar paper, UCT Centre for African Studies, 2006).
Edmund Leach, ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social
Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 1–23.
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Inside African Anthropology
and orientation towards her adopted discipline than has hitherto been
recognised.
Chapter 2 follows the newly graduated Hunter into the field. In reconstructing the micro-social world of her field-sites and the role of successive collaborations with African intermediaries at these sites, I provide
a close reading of the fieldnotes she recorded in Pondoland and that
have been preserved across some twenty folders in the Wilson Collection. The chapter takes us to the multiple sites where Hunter collected
ethnographic data during eighteen months of fieldwork in 1931 and
1932: Auckland Village near her home, Ntibane near Umtata in Western
Pondoland, and four stores and a mission station in Eastern Pondoland. This multi-sited approach to fieldwork was another of her distinctive contributions and one on which she reflected in an important early
methodological essay.55 At each of these field-sites, I explore the relationships between Monica Hunter and her African research assistants, drawing on Jacobs’s concept of ‘the intimate politics’ of knowledge. This view
from the field reveals, in a way that the celebrated published monograph
does not, the extent of the role played by African assistants, variously as
tutors in Xhosa, translators, transcribers, bodyguards, hostesses, social
networkers, guides in cultural etiquette, informants and (in one case) as
an author of fieldnotes.
After returning from Western Pondoland in the final months of 1931,
Monica started to prepare for fieldwork in urban settings and on farms in
the Eastern Cape. In Chapter 3 Leslie J. Bank returns to the 400 pages of
fieldnotes that Monica compiled in East London between February and
April of 1932 and that were discussed in Part II of Reaction to Conquest,
‘The Bantu in Towns’. He makes an argument for the importance of her
urban anthropological work of 1932, which began a month before Eileen
Krige embarked on her household survey study of Marabastad in Pretoria
and a year before Ellen Hellmann began working in Rooiyard.56 In order
to gain access to people’s homes and lives in a highly volatile climate,
she needed to be seen as a friend of the trade union movement. Here
Clements Kadalie, the leader of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (a more radical offshoot of the Independent
Commercial Workers’ Union) played a decisive role. Her main intermediaries in East Bank were two other contacts of her father’s: the ageing
erstwhile African nationalist political leader Walter Benson Rubusana
and his Lovedale-educated wife. Like her interpreters in Pondoland, the
55
56
Monica Hunter, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, Africa, 7, 3 (1934), 335–350.
M. Gluckman, ‘Introductory Note’ in E. Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an
Urban Native Slum Yard (Cape Town and Livingstone: Oxford University Press and the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1948: RLI Papers No. 13), 125 pp. + 19 photographs.
Monica’s study was of urban Africans more generally, as the title of Part II indicates.
Introduction
19
Rubusanas performed multiple roles as interpreters, from ensuring her
safety (along with an employed bodyguard) to facilitating social contact
networks, and also acted as primary informants who played a decisive
role in shaping her critical attitude towards the rapidity of social change
in the location and an associated criticism of youth morality.57
Drawing on James Clifford’s distinction between three different forms
of field-writing – inscription, transcription and description – Leslie Bank
explores the ways in which interviews and observations were converted
into notes, and then examines how the notes were transformed into
published texts. The political volatility of East Bank helps to explain why
she was not always able to write out her notes in full and would later
move quickly between compressed notes and inscriptions to the final
text. This created gaps of interpretation. The largest gap between her
notes and her ethnography lies in her exclusion of most of the fascinating
and detailed case studies she collected on dreams. Leslie Bank argues
that the collection of dream narratives was influenced by her Pondoland
work, where she had come to appreciate the role of dreams in Pondo
interpretations of everyday life. The collection of dreams gave Hunter
vital insights into the imagination of urban residents. The absence of any
sustained analysis of this data in her final text created a critical silence
in her work on the identity politics of ordinary African urbanites. Had
Monica Hunter analysed the dreams she collected, he argues, we might
have understood more fully some of the limits of social change in East
London in the 1930s and developed insights into the subsequent power
of Africanist politics in this and other South African cities during the
1950s and 1960s.
Our case for contribution in Part 2 is again a balancing act between
recognition of the crucial role played by African research assistants,
here a single individual whose biography and anthropological work
are explored at chapter-length, and a renewed appreciation of the significance of Monica Hunter Wilson as an ethnographer. Contrary to
the conventional view that Wilson’s foremost contribution lay in the
depth of her fieldwork, something seen to have been encapsulated in
the title of her late-life Hoernlé memorial lecture ‘So Truth Be in the
Field’,58 Rebecca Marsland makes a powerful case for the achievement of
57
58
The contribution of Kadalie and the Rubusanas to her East Bank research is also
discussed in some detail in Chapter 2.
Monica Wilson, ‘ . . . So Truth Be in the Field . . . ’ (The Alfred and Winifred Hoernlé
Memorial Lecture, Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975);
Colin Murray, ‘“So Truth Be in the Field”: A Short Appreciation of Monica Wilson’,
Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1983), 129–130. For a fine short essay highlighting her gifts as a fieldworker, and those of Godfrey, see Audrey Richards, ‘Monica
Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social
Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape
Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 1–13.
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Inside African Anthropology
Monica as author (a theme further developed in relation to her coauthored Langa study in Chapter 8). Her Nyakyusa trilogy foregrounded
Godfrey’s research on ‘pagan’ ritual and featured her potentially equally
innovative work on social change as little more than an afterthought, pursued at most length in just two concluding chapters of the third volume.
But Godfrey’s ‘voice’ was so skilfully appropriated, Marsland argues, that
the studies read almost as if they were co-authored.59 Taking up on David
Hammond-Tooke’s claim that she conceived of her Nyakyusa books as
‘a sacred trust and a labour of love’,60 Marsland examines the emotional
and personal associations involved not only in the production of the fieldnotes in Bunyakyusa, but in the lengthy process of revisiting, reordering
and analysing the 78 surviving notebooks recorded by Godfrey.61 This
revisiting of his writings is presented as a process that was at once personal, emotional and spiritual, one that would have recalled for her the
shared experiences of fieldwork and happy years in Bunyakyusa but also
the pain of loss after his tragic early death.
The other central theme in Marsland’s essay is a case for a divergence of
fieldwork ‘styles’. She contrasts the field presence of Godfrey Wilson the
gregarious, immersed participant with that of Monica, the more reserved
and relatively remote observer. She demonstrates that his notebooks
reveal a degree of engagement with Nyakyusa culture which Monica
was not able to achieve, for a complex of reasons that include her greater
difficulty with the language, her missionary background and preference
for conducting fieldwork close to missions, the way in which they ordered
their domestic arrangements, her late start, the serious bout of malaria
which forced her to be ‘invalided out’ of the field for six crucial months
during the most productive phase of the fieldwork (September 1936 –
January 1938), but especially to her inability to establish any equivalent
to the masculine world of sociability that Godfrey was able to develop.
In the following chapter Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and
I reconstruct the life history and contribution of Leonard Mwaisumo
to the production of the Wilsons’ anthropological knowledge about the
Nyakyusa. Monica did recognise his contribution generously in her first
monograph, acknowledging his work as a language teacher, translator
and recorder of the numerous texts on witchcraft that feature in her
59
60
61
On the Wilsons’ ‘co-production of scientific knowledge’ (to use Schumaker’s term,
Africanizing Anthropology, 246–255), see Seán Morrow, ‘“This Is from the Firm”:
The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished paper
presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, June 2008); Megan
Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others in South-West Tanganyika’ (unpublished paper,
Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, June 2008).
Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 82–83.
Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Department, UCT
Libraries [henceforth WC], D1.1 Godfrey Wilson Notebooks, 1–79 (no. 12 is missing).
Introduction
21
substantial appendix of ‘Selected Documents’. The archival traces reveal
that his role was even more fundamental. During his fifteen months of
work with the Wilsons, first with Godfrey alone and then with both
Godfrey and Monica, Leonard Mwaisumo taught them to speak
Kinyakyusa, giving each many weeks of daily lessons – about six months
apart, given Monica’s late arrival. His work with Godfrey also involved
creating a Kinyakyusa–English vocabulary list which was soon envisaged
as a dictionary. He then guided them from one field-site to another,
negotiating their relationships at each of these sites with successive networks of informants. In Godfrey’s case these were initially the Christian
elders at Mwaya on the lake shore and ‘pagan’ elders like the rainmaker
Kasitile to whom Leonard introduced Godfrey in January of 1935; in
Monica’s case it was the Christian communities and the world of the
school. Here his dual identity as a Christian convert and as a man
with a deep knowledge of, and ongoing respect for, the ‘old customs’
(ikikolo) made him an ideal mediator between worlds. He is undoubtedly
the most vocal presence in Godfrey’s notebook records, which Monica
used as the basis for her 1950s trilogy. He also actively intervened in
interviews, questioning informants himself but frequently commenting
retrospectively on the veracity of their testimony. He recorded about
a thousand pages of Kinyakyusa text between January and November
of 1935, variously divided between his own seven notebooks, texts in
Godfrey’s notebooks or interspersed inscriptions among Monica’s loosesheet fieldnotes. These texts provide a detailed insider perspective on
Nyakyusa customs, especially on attitudes about sexuality, marriage and
divorce. We conclude by suggesting that Mwaisumo might more justly
be described as an indigenous ethnographer or African intellectual than
as a ‘native clerk’.
Part 3 of the volume moves from the field to the university. Seán
Morrow’s essay provides a vivid and biographically rich account of
Monica’s two-and-a-half years at Fort Hare Native College. This was
where she began her career as a university lecturer in July of 1944,
just six weeks after her husband’s death. He begins by highlighting the
importance of her choice to remain in South Africa rather than to take
up a prestigious position at an overseas university, giving evidence of
the range of options that were available to her during these years. The
core section of the chapter is an exploration of her many warm and
productive relationships with African colleagues, friends and students
under her supervision, both in the women’s hostel where she worked as a
warden and in her anthropology classes. She had ambitious ideas about
the development of an African studies research programme at Fort Hare
and while these were never realised three of her undergraduate students
went on to publish ethnographic studies in the leading South African
journal, African Studies, in the years between 1945 and 1951: Livingstone
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Inside African Anthropology
Mqotsi, Nimrod Mkele and Godfrey Pitje. At the heart of the chapter is
the story of her relationship with Pitje, a man who in later years described
himself as her ‘intellectual son’. Morrow provides a measured account
of the contribution of Godfrey Pitje’s published work on Venda initiation and education, which has in recent years served as a rich source
of empirical material for scholars writing about the history of African
sexuality.62
Leslie Bank presents an extended intellectual biography of her other
star undergraduate student at Fort Hare, Livingstone Mqotsi. His essay
explores Wilson’s connection to an emerging black intelligentsia in the
Eastern Cape and the way in which a potential cadre of new intellectuals, trained in Social Anthropology or what she also like to call African
Sociology, were inducted into the academy, but were then expelled from
participation in the system of higher learning at South African universities. In most cases, these intellectuals ended up in liberation politics,
often in exile, and are seldom remembered today for their intellectual
work outside of politics. He traces the history of a relationship between
Wilson and Mqotsi that was one of intellectual mentorship, cooperation
and mutual respect, one that culminated in Mqotsi’s production of significant ethnographic texts which hitherto have been hidden from view.
Despite the emphasis on cohesion and social function in Wilson’s own
work, Leslie Bank argues that Mqotsi presents a radical view of Xhosa
society as shot though with contradiction and saturated with conflict,
anxiety and spiritual insecurity. In his Limba church ethnography, which
he produced for Monica in the mid-1940s, this perspective is developed
most fully in his discussion of the ubiquity of witchcraft belief and spiritual insecurity in the New Brighton location of Port Elizabeth in the
1940s. Later, in his study of healers in Middledrift, which was also
undertaken under Monica’s supervision, Mqotsi is even more explicit
about the lines of conflict and cleavage in Xhosa society and sets out the
contradictions in gender and generational relations. However, in dealing with conflict and anxiety in this study, he often turns to theories
and approaches from psychology, presumably because the anthropology of the day was not particularly helpful in this regard. Leslie Bank
argues that had Mqotsi entered the academy and joined an anthropology
62
Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective’ in Peter Delius and Liz Walker, African Studies Special Issue: AIDS in Context,
61, 1 (2002), 27–54. Delius and Glaser also make generous use of Hunter’s Pondoland
work as well as the ethnographies of Ellen Hellmann, Isaac Schapera, Philip and Iona
Mayer and Laura Longmore as empirical sources about the history of sexual attitudes
in South Africa. For the use of this ethnographic literature in relation to the history
of ideas about polygamy, see Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, ‘The Myths of Polygamy:
A History of Extra-Marital and Multi-Partnership Sex in South Africa’, South African
Historical Journal, 50 (2004), 84–114.
Introduction
23
department, he would have engaged these tensions more theoretically
from within the discipline. Outside of these considerations, Mqotsi’s ethnography is important and valuable simply by virtue of his command
of the Xhosa language and the cultural field within which he operates.
This is most evident in the Middledrift healers study, where he provides
an encyclopaedic account of the names of medicinal herbs and remedies
used by healers as well as other aspects of their healing practices. This
ethnographic depth and detail comes from having an ‘insider’ command
of the language and culture.
In Middledrift, Mqotsi was an ‘insider-outsider’, like many of the
African anthropologists of his generation. By the time he arrived in the
villages he had spent more than a decade in Port Elizabeth and several years at Fort Hare University. His educational achievements and
social position clearly situated him culturally ‘outside’ of the local village
worlds he studied. In fact, when he arrived in Middledrift, he presented
himself as a cultural outsider, as a town boy who had lost contact with
his own Xhosa roots. He asked the healers to educate him and teach
him his own culture, which they seemed willing to do. But he already
knew a great deal about the Xhosa practice of healing and could clearly
understand and translate what he was being told. He had no need of an
interpreter. In many ways, Livingstone Mqotsi was the perfect insideroutsider, the ideal anthropologist – embedded enough to understand
virtually everything inside, but socially distanced enough for informants
not to take his presence and questions for granted.
The concluding chapter in this section, written by Andrew Bank with
Vuyiswa Swana, examines Monica’s collaboration with her most famous
former research assistant, Archie Mafeje, in their joint and sometimes
undervalued study of Langa, published by Oxford University Press in
1963. We trace the long history of the Langa research project alongside the life story of Archie Mafeje, both stories beginning in 1936/7.
We recommend that, rather than attempting to disaggegate the contributions of Wilson and Mafeje to the published study, as contemporary
reviewers and latter-day scholars have tended to do by attributing sole or
primary ‘authorship’ to one or the other, readers should value the study
precisely for its unusual ability to draw together the insights of a passionate young insider ethnographer and an established senior scholar who
was able to formulate incisive ethnographic questions and repackage her
co-researcher’s wide-ranging field report for an international readership.
Their Langa study is undoubtedly the fullest example in this collection of
what Lyn Schumaker terms ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’.
The issue of insider ethnography is the other central theme of the
chapter. The insider–outsider dichotomy is well illustrated by the contrast
we draw, drawing on an article by one of Monica’s former colleagues,
John Sharp, between the fieldwork styles of Robin Crosse-Upcott and
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Inside African Anthropology
Archie Mafeje.63 Where the bluff former cadet and Oxford graduate
never got beyond interviews with a few church leaders and a well-known
township collaborator, and tended to think of his fieldwork as a form
of military engagement, Mafeje was able to immerse himself in township life from the outset, partly because of his already well-established
social networks and political connections in the location. He participated
actively in forms of popular culture, notably jazz and sport, that were
less fully documented in the book than in his rich field report. We draw
attention to the many ways in which Mafeje was an insider in Langa.
He was a cultural insider, a man with knowledge of both Xhosa migrant
culture, which bore fruit in his detailed and still celebrated case studies
of ‘home-boys’, and of the culture of Xhosa townsmen with whom he
socialised at university, in political meetings and in his leisure time. He
was also as comfortable relating to women as to men. Central to our
story is, of course, the personal and intellectual relationship between
Monica and Mafeje, and how it changed over the years as he developed
from struggling undergraduate student to passionate fieldworker, and to
co-researcher.
Part 4 provides reflections on the legacy of Monica Hunter Wilson.
Seán Morrow and Christopher Saunders, who worked as one of Monica
Wilson’s research assistants on The Oxford History of South Africa for
some months, make a powerful case for a thorough reassessment of this
two-volume history, but also for the centrality of Monica Wilson’s role
in its production. While The Oxford History was jointly planned with
Leonard Thompson in 1963 and unfolded as the product of a shared
vision of a new history structured around the concept of ‘interaction’,
the project was in fact driven and led by Wilson. This is most evident
from the behind-the-scenes correspondence which they have unearthed
in the Wilson Collection, her listing as first editor of both volumes and
her authorship of five of the most important chapters: on hunters and
herders, the Nguni, the Sotho, the Cape’s eastern frontier and African
peasant farmers. When looked at in the longer view and outside of the
intense revisionist-liberal historical debates of the early 1970s, they suggest this ambitious two-volume edited collection may be considered as
a pioneering, wide-ranging and thoroughly interdisciplinary attempt to
provide a sustained engagement with the history of the majority of the
country’s inhabitants from pre-colonial through to colonial times. This
indeed is how it seems to have been read by Nelson Mandela, Neville
Alexander and other political prisoners on Robben Island.
Morrow and Saunders patiently locate The Oxford History as the outcome of Wilson’s lifelong engagement with historical studies, one that
63
John Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual’s Journey’ in Adebayo
Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue: ‘Archie
Mafeje (1935–2007): A Giant Has Moved On’, 3 and 4 (2008), 31–36.
Introduction
25
began during her school years at Lovedale, continued through her undergraduate years at Girton and, as they well demonstrate, remained an
inseparable aspect of the social change approach towards anthropology
that set her apart from most of her British functionalist peers in subsequent decades. In fact, they argue, she explicitly identified anthropology as the only effective means of studying African history in a period
before the latter had been founded as a field in its own right. They tracked
the concept of social change through her anthropological writings from
the sections on African life in towns and on farms in Reaction to Conquest
to her co-produced theoretical study with Godfrey Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change, Based on Observations in Central Africa, published
in 1945, to her strong emphasis on historical process in the Nyakyusa
studies, most notably in the concluding volume, For Men and Elders:
Changes in the Relations of Generations and between Men and Women among
the Nyakyusa-Ngonde People, 1875–1971, published in 1977. More than
any other essay in this collection, their chapter provides a sense of the
eclecticism and range of Monica Wilson’s interests. Her abiding intellectual curiosity is evidenced in her spirited debates about history and
anthropology in letters written to the American anthropologist George
Murdock in the 1950s; her great excitement at new archaeological finds of
the 1960s establishing the early presence of Bantu-speaking inhabitants
in the region, centuries before Van Riebeeck; her ongoing fascination
with ‘animal sociology’; and her late-life project to write an ecological
history of the Hogsback mountains and Tyumie valley.
This is what Monica Wilson’s last graduate student, and later successor
as woman professor and head of the Social Anthropology Department at
UCT, recognised from her undergraduate years as her mentor’s ‘deep,
unquestioned involvement in the pursuit of knowledge for itself and for
her recognition of the potential power inherent in it’.64 In the concluding essay Reynolds reflects on the relationships of anthropologists and
their research assistants based on her own extensive experience of fieldwork in southern Africa and the United States. She warns of the dangers
of retrospective readings and, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, insists on
the need to assess intellectual contributions in the terms in which they
were produced and received, the need – as she puts it – to ‘reposition
ourselves in the intellectual tradition’. She cautions against too great
an emphasis on the role of research assistants in a contemporary context in which reassessments of the respective roles of white researchers
and African assistants are politically overdetermined. She encourages
us to think about the complexity of anthropological knowledge production in terms of ‘four layers which bleach into one another to produce
an ethnography: 1. Training and theoretical preparation; 2. Fieldwork;
64
See Chapter 10 in this volume.
26
Inside African Anthropology
3. Analysis; 4. Writing’, suggesting that it is only in the second of these
phases that the role of local ‘cultural brokers’ is prominent. She argues
that the relationships of anthropologists with informants and of research
assistants with informants also warrant close examination. Her essay ends
with a personal memoir recalling her interactions with Monica Wilson at
her field-site in Crossroads and at Wilson’s retirement home in the Hogsback. Here she suggests that there was something akin to a transmission
from teacher to student, that there is a sense of her having taken forward
something that went beyond the insistence on rigour in the field, on precision when writing, on integrity in social relations, but that is better
conceived in affective or less tangible terms as a spirit of engagement.
The Rich Life of the Wilson Collection
As the above chapter outline suggests, one of our primary claims to
significance is our collective, coordinated and systematic engagement
with the documents archived in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers
(Wilson Collection) at UCT. While some essays, notably those in Part 3
of the volume, make extensive use of supplementary oral materials,
all of the chapters are based on many months, and sometimes a number
of years, of sifting through and analysing the documents in the Wilson
Collection. It is therefore essential to provide introductory contextual
information about the history of this unique archive and what some of
its rare treasures might be.
If we follow the suggestion of the theorist who has been at the forefront
of ‘the archival turn’ in southern African studies (Carolyn Hamilton) that
we think of archives as having biographies,65 how might we narrate the
life history of the Wilson Collection? The ‘backstories’ of this archive,66
what one might consider to be the preface to this biography, are the
life histories of its two main subjects, their acts of cumulative creation of
documents relating to their personal and working lives, their preservation
of these materials, but also of the stories of their dialogues with the
many interpreters who worked with them during these decades. In this
background period I conceive of these documents as being in an almost
constant state of production and transition, being recorded on a daily
or weekly basis, at multiple locations and often initially preserved in
ad hoc ways. While there were occasions on which materials got lost,
as in the case of Godfrey Wilson’s Nyakyusa notebook number 12, the
extent of the preservation of this accumulating body of documentary
materials is truly remarkable. The very specific nature of many of the
archive items illustrates the point: whether this relates to prescriptions
65
66
Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’.
Ibid., 320.
Introduction
27
for spectacles (which Monica was given in 1938), a custom slip for the
taking of a typewriter to England in December 1932 (as Monica did
for the writing up of her Cambridge doctoral thesis), or that for the
HMV portable gramophone and records that the newly married couple
evidently took with them into south-west Tanganyika, or to the thousands
of handwritten and typed fieldnotes that Monica preserved, seemingly
almost down to the last sliver.67
It is worth enquiring why Monica preserved these documents so faithfully, indeed one might almost say obsessively (with such felicitous consequences for the modern researcher)? Her attitude towards documents
would have been shaped from childhood years and here again her father
was a decisive influence. As a former branch manager of a large family
business, David Hunter was given to accurate accounting. The papers
in the David and Jessie Hunter Collection reveal him to be a man of
meticulous habits in this regard. We have detailed journals of his world
travels from his teenage years, reports of his tour of mission stations in
southern Africa (and a recently uncovered stash of photographs taken en
route)68 and diaries for almost every year of his adult life.69 The minutiae
of everyday life penned in these diaries provide, for example, our surest
records of events and dates in Monica’s life from her weight at birth (see
Chapter 1) to the dates of her successive fieldwork excursions and that of
her Cambridge oral exam (see Chapter 2). He encouraged his daughter
to keep records of her accounts from her school days at Collegiate Girls’
High in Port Elizabeth, a practice she carried forward into her university
years.70 He also encouraged her to plan her life by means of diaries. His
insistence that she write weekly letters home, her diligence in this regard
and his careful preservation of each of these missives – 360 in all – provide
far and away the richest materials about the personal and intellectual life
of Monica as a teenager and young adult.
To this she brought her own attitude towards the status of written documents. As noted above, she was passionate about history from schooldays
and envisaged becoming a history teacher before she switched in the
midst of her Cambridge undergraduate career to social anthropology. As
Morrow and Saunders insist, she never really let go of this passion for
history, and initially conceived of her anthropological work as the only
67
68
69
70
The respective archival references are to WC, A2.12, A2.22, H2.2 (Auckland), uncatalogued notes (Pondoland and East London), D2-D7 (Nyakyusa fieldnotes), K3 [Langa]
(includes notes to and from MW).
Francis Wilson, personal communication, 10 February 2012.
Archives and Manuscripts Department, UCT Libraries, David and Jessie Hunter
Papers, AA1.1 Pocket diaries, 1890–1893, 1895, 1898–1948; AA1.4 Travel diaries
Norway 1871, Cruise of the yacht ‘Osprey’, 1889; Victoria Falls 1904; AA2 Accounts
of travels . . . Some recollections of Ceylon; DD1.1 Report on tour of mission stations
in South Africa, TSS, 10 Oct. 1895.
WC, A2.9 [MW] School and University accounts.
28
Inside African Anthropology
practical way of grappling with African history at a time before the latter
was a formal field of study. It might also be that her deeply religious
background (discussed in Chapter 1) encouraged an added sense of reverence for the written word. There is certainly a sense when immersing
oneself in the Wilson Collection that she was deeply committed to the
preservation of written documents relating to her life and work, and she
may well have had the sense in her later life of these materials as part
of an autobiography or biography in the making.71 There is hardly any
form of documentation that she seems to have considered too ad hoc or
peripheral for preservation.
To return to the life story of the Collection, I date the formal process
of its ‘archival housing’72 to the retirement years of Monica between
1973 and 1982. It is she whom we should think of as the first curator
of the Wilson Collection. In this first phase of its life, the Collection
was located in a square stone building, some twenty metres apart from
the main stone house at Hunterstoun. Monica had built this outhouse
herself, expressly for the purpose of storing books and manuscripts, but
also to serve as a place for her continued writing.73 When Leslie Bank
and I first visited her library in August of 2007, this large room with
an adjoining hallway had been cleared of the archival documents, but
her bookshelves were packed tight with an astonishingly wide range of
anthropological, historical, botanical, theological and other texts which
bore witness to a depth and breadth of learning. Stacked on her writing
table, seemingly in the very state in which they had been left when she
died twenty-five years earlier, were hardback copies of what we took to
be her favourite books. Arranged in chronological order were original
editions of Reaction to Conquest, Langa, the two volume Oxford History,
and autobiographies of Z. K. Matthews, published in 1981, and John
Dover Wilson.74 Her reading glasses were neatly positioned flush against
the volumes.
We were, however, taken aback to find another desk, symmetrically
arranged, on the other side the room, and to find that there were two
71
72
73
74
Francis Wilson spoke of ‘continuing the autobiography of Monica Wilson’ when he and
Lindy Wilson interviewed her about her Pondoland fieldwork at Hunterstoun in July
1979. (WC, uncatalogued).
Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’,
320. There have of course been many other ways in which ‘the archive’ has been
conceptualised apart from the notion of the archive as a building, a place, a repository
for documents. As much recent literature demonstrates, in our electronic age it is no
longer possible to think of archival collections as bounded, ordered and contained within
a single space. The recent digitisation of the Bleek-Lloyd notebooks and other materials
related to the /Xam and !Kung researches of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd is but
one of many recent examples of this blurring of boundaries in relation to the access or
containment of documentary materials.
Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’, 24.
John Dover Wilson, Milestones on the Dover Road (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).
Introduction
29
lounge chairs rather than one facing onto the fireplace. The extra seat
and working desk, we soon realised, were symbolic markers of the spirit
of Monica’s late husband Godfrey who, almost forty years after his death,
still remained ‘an active presence’ in her spiritual and emotional life.75
The anthropologist Robert Thornton confirmed this when he told us of
the uncomfortable experience of having sat in ‘Godfrey’s chair’, or on
‘Godfrey’s ghost’ as he put it, during an awkward visit to Hunterstoun
in the year before she died.76
Monica’s archive may thus be said to have had a dual character. On
the one hand, it would have had the orderliness of official repositories of
documents. I imagine her distribution of documents across cupboards,
bookcases, shelving cabinets and trunks as orderly (for the most part),
even if the logic was at times personal or idiosyncratic. On the other
hand, this space and the documents within it had intensely private associations. Here we should bear in mind Rebecca Marsland’s argument
(noted above) that Godfrey’s notebooks served as a memorial to his
presence during her many years of writing up the Nyakyusa studies. The
layout and set-apart location gave the building the air of a chapel, as
did its stone structure, bringing to mind Achille Mbembe’s evocative
description of the entanglement of the material and the imaginary in the
very architecture of an archive.
The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension, which encompasses the physical space of the site of the building,
its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms [here one large
room], the organisation of the ‘files’, the labyrinth of corridors, and that
degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that give the place something
of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of
rituals is constantly taking place there [here reading and writing], rituals
that . . . are of a quasi-magical nature, and a cemetery in the sense that
fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and
footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics.77
The second chapter in this life history, what we might like to think of
as the unsettled teenage years of the Wilson Collection, saw most of the
documents being moved to a private office in the Social Anthropology
Department at UCT. Pamela Reynolds was the main curator during
this relatively brief transitional period, although she does not appear
to have worked much with the materials. Reynolds had returned from
ten years of field research in Zimbabwe to take up a post in UCT’s
75
76
77
Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 83.
Robert Thornton, personal communication, 24 June 2008. He was also rightly wrapped
over the knuckles for placing his tea cup on a copy of the Bible.
Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’ (trans. from French by Judith
Inggs) in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid
and Roger Salek, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19.
30
Inside African Anthropology
Anthropology Department. She intended to write a biography of her late
supervisor. Francis and Tim Wilson gave her permission to transfer to her
office all the archival documents relating to the private and working life
of Monica, notably including the voluminous collections of letters and
fieldnotes (on which our study draws most heavily).78 This is where they
remained between 1992 and 1996. In the end she chose not to write the
biography.
Francis and Tim Wilson then engaged in negotiations with the Manuscripts and Archives Department in order to have the Wilson Collection
transferred to UCT Libraries79 and thus made accessible to the public
for the first time.80 As indicated in our Acknowledgements, the transfer
coincided with the appointment of Lesley Hart as head of Manuscripts
and Archives and may be seen to herald the moment when the Collection
came of age. The adult years of the Wilson Collection, if we might pursue
the metaphor, have been relatively settled. Having taken charge of transferred materials from Pamela Reynolds’s office, Hart spent more than a
year compiling an index to the Collection in 1998 and 1999. This is the
means by which the authors of these essays have accessed the papers. Her
26-page inventory divides the Collection into the Monica and Godfrey
Wilson Papers and those of Monica Wilson’s parents, a six-page subsection entitled the David and Jessie Hunter Papers.81 The following year,
Hart journeyed to Hogsback to assess the state of the remaining documents at Hunterstoun and then on a weekend trip in 2001 transferred a
Kombi-load of boxes, files and folders back to UCT Library.
Following well-established archival guidelines, ones which she had
already applied in compiling catalogues for eight other archival collections at UCT,82 Hart divided the materials into private and public
78
79
80
81
82
Not all of the documents relating to Monica’s private and working life were transferred to
her office, however. Lesley Hart recalls: ‘When I was processing the collection [in 1998–
9], I wondered about some of the very evident gaps – the reason for which became clear
when I visited Hunterstoun for the first time [in 2000], and saw that there was still a large
quantity of material in the filing cabinets and cupboards’ [personal communication,
7 Dec. 2012].
They had been in contact with the UCT Archives and Manuscripts Department for some
years. See letter written in November of 1992 by Francis Wilson to Leonie TwentymanJones, then Head of Manuscripts and Archives. See Provenance folder, BC880 Monica
Wilson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Department. At this stage, however, Reynolds
was still intent on writing the biography and wished to keep most of the materials in her
office.
The American social anthropologist James G. Ellison, fresh from two years of fieldwork
in Bunyakyusa, was the first researcher to consult the Wilson Collection in this new
public space. Andrew Bank interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010.
He worked mainly on the Nyakyusa notebooks of Godfrey Wilson and those of three
of his research assistants (see Chapter 5), which had, in fact, been transferred to UCT
Libraries in 1994.
Lesley Hart, BC880 The Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index compiled by Lesley
Hart (Cape Town: UCT Libraries, 1999), 21–26.
The one she remembers best is that of Oswald Doughty (BC666), an internationally
renowned expert on the post-Raphaelite scholar Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Andrew Bank
Introduction
31
documents, beginning with the former. Her ‘List’ thus begins with personal papers, followed by the voluminous collections of letters, first those
of Godfrey, then those of Monica: in each case first the correspondence
with family members, then with anthropological colleagues and scholarly peers, and then contacts with others. The subsections then follow
the professional careers of the Wilsons, again that of Godfrey in the first
instance, tracked from his 78 Bunyakyusa notebooks and those of his
research assistants (here Monica’s fieldnotes feature as well) through his
two years of research at Broken Hill (Kabwe) in Northern Rhodesia,
a still almost entirely untouched treasure trove of notebooks and other
materials recorded by Godfrey Wilson in his years as RLI director, to the
documents relating to the making of the posthumously published Analysis
of Social Change. Hart’s list then follows Monica’s career from Student
Essays and Notes through to her Eastern Cape research projects, including the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey of the late 1940s as well as her bulk
of work in Pondoland, to her working life as a researcher and teacher at
UCT, including all the materials relating to the making of the Langa
study.83 Their family and fieldwork photograph materials are listed near
the end of the inventory. Finally, as noted above, there is an extensive
inventory of the papers of Monica’s missionary parents, David and Jessie
Hunter.
Behind these ostensibly dry divisions into Wilson Papers and Hunter
Papers, private papers and public papers, Godfrey Wilson documents and
Monica Wilson documents, written documents and visual documents
lies an extraordinary wealth of information. The riches of the Wilson
Collection are perhaps best illustrated by contrasting them with written
and visual materials in archival collections of her anthropological colleagues working in southern Africa at the same time. Here I will focus
particularly on the archives of fellow women anthropologists with which
I am familiar: the Winifred Hoernlé Papers and the Ellen Hellmann
Papers at Wits University, the Jack and Eileen Krige Collection at Killie
Campbell Library in Durban, and the Hilda Kuper Papers at UCLA.
The Hellmann Papers and the Winifred Hoernlé Papers are both small
collections, largely shorn of personal information. The Hellmann Papers
consist of some forty folders stored in seven boxes, almost all of which are
confined to her public and published writings.84 The Winifred Hoernlé
Collection is stored in eight boxes and also includes only a scattering of letters along with the originals of her field diaries (which have
83
84
interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010). Doughty was UCT’s Arderne
Professor of English from the late 1920s to 1954. He would have met with Monica
Wilson in 1952 when she took up her post as Chair of Social Anthropology and Head
of the School of African Studies.
Lesley Hart, BC880 The Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index.
A1419, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand.
32
Inside African Anthropology
been published),85 lecture notes and early chapters of an uncompleted
draft doctoral manuscript in preparation, which was being supervised by
Radcliffe-Brown,86 and an incomplete draft posthumous biography of
her husband, the philosopher Alfred Hoernlé.
The other two collections are more substantial. There are 72 boxes of
materials in the Hilda Kuper Papers,87 as well as her Swaziland notebooks which gathered dust in a backroom for some fifteen years without
the archivists knowing about their location. The correspondence in this
collection relates almost entirely to her working life and professional
contacts, and there is, for example, virtually no information and no
visual images of her relationships with her parents, siblings or sociologist
husband.88 The Jack and Eileen Krige Collection at the Killie Campbell
Library in Durban is equally extensive, but is also strikingly silent about
the private life of these two anthropologists, with little more than an occasional letter from the field written by Eileen to her father, and only rare
items of correspondence between the Kriges and their anthropological
colleagues.
When viewed in this wider comparative frame, the Wilson Collection
is highly distinctive. This relates not only to its scale, but to the density,
depth and historical continuity of information about the personal life of
Monica (as well as that of Godfrey). These other archives contain no
body of material about the parents of these other scholars that begins
to compare with the David and Jessie Hunter Papers. In addition, and
as already noted, the 360 letters written by Monica to her father (with
whom she was very close) give us the most textured of accounts of her
thoughts and feelings and changing attitudes as she grew from a teenager
to a young woman embarking on an unusual career. They are filled with
details of her intellectual passions as well as her private life.89 These other
archives also have no equivalent of the collections of documents listed
under ‘personal papers’, which in the case of Godfrey Wilson includes
school certificates, military records, his fascinating diary of his travels on
his first visit to South Africa and then during his early first months
of fieldwork, his budget of field expenses and the occasional religious
tract. Monica Wilson’s personal papers include her school and university
85
86
87
88
89
Carstens, Klinghardt and West, eds, Trails in the Thirstland. It was in fact Hellmann who
passed them on to Carstens in 1967, having been entrusted with them seven years earlier
when her much-loved mentor died. She began the process of transcription herself, but
was unable to complete it on account of her mentor’s illegible handwriting.
AU8 HOE, University Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
Collection 1343, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los
Angeles.
I have not yet consulted the Leo Kuper Papers at the University of North Carolina,
which may contain more information about their private life.
This contrasts with only 17 letters to and from her mother for reasons I explore in my
account of her childhood in Chapter 1.
Introduction
33
certificates, her private diaries, and miscellaneous items like the customs
forms and spectacle prescription mentioned above.
Another significant difference is that these collections contain no equivalent information about the marital and intertwined professional relationships of the scholars with their respective spouses, all of whom were
either anthropologists or sociologists (bar Ellen Hellmann’s husband,
who was a lawyer). There are no surviving letters between Eileen Jensen
Krige and Jack Krige, the other husband-and-wife team whose joint
International African Institute-funded fieldwork of the mid-1930s produced an internationally respected anthropological study.90 Contrast this
with 438 letters written by Godfrey to Monica and 190 letters written by
Monica to Godfrey, all concentrated on the intense decade of their joint
anthropological work between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s.91
Most of these collections contain records of correspondence with fellow anthropologists, oriented as they all are towards the professional
lives of these women. Even here the Wilson Collection stands out by
comparison. The twelve letters to and from Eddie Roux reinforce the
sense provided in her correspondence to her father that he was a significant influence during her undergraduate years at Cambridge. The warm
personal and intellectual relationship of both of the Wilsons with Audrey
Richards is documented in 137 letters between Monica and Audrey, running from 1940 to 1982, and 110 letters between Godfrey and Audrey
concentrated in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when they communicated
about Bemba language and culture.92 The letters to and from African
students and research assistants have been an obvious treasure in relation
to our study; different essays collected here have drawn on Monica’s carefully preserved correspondences with Godfrey Pitje, Livingstone Mqotsi
and Archie Mafeje – running into dozens of letters dating from 1960 to
1973 in the latter case.
To this we must add the privilege of access to a remarkably full visual
record of the private life of Monica Wilson. For example, while it took
90
91
92
Eileen Jensen Krige and Jack D. Krige, The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the
Pattern of Lovedu Society (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for
the International African Institute, 1943). Like Reaction to Conquest, this classic text also
featured a foreword by Jan Smuts.
The impact of this on our book has been limited by restricted access. Only one of the
researchers contributing to this volume, Seán Morrow, has been granted access to this
part of the Collection by Francis and Tim Wilson. Megan Vaughan was also granted
permission to consult these letters. The reasons for the restrictions seemingly relate to
the sensitivity of the materials. Some letters are intimate in nature, especially in the early
years, and in the last months they document the mental decline that ultimately led to
Godfrey’s tragic suicide. For a sense of this intimacy, see Seán Morrow, ‘“This Is from
the Firm” ’.
WC, B4.7 and B6.14. I have not consulted the Audrey Richards Collection at University
of London, which may be comparable to the Wilson Collection in the extent and range
of its information about personal life, but especially about anthropological networks.
34
Inside African Anthropology
considerable effort to unearth a single photograph of Winifred Tucker
Hoernlé as a teenager, wife or mother (there are in fact just two such
images that survive), the Wilson Collection contains photographs for
most years of Monica’s childhood and early adulthood: often many photographs in a given year. There are also dozens of photographs of her
parents; a few of her elder brother who died so young as well as one
of his grave; many of her close friends, particularly her women friends
from Girton College; and, of course, many of Godfrey at home or in the
field and of their own children; as well as a scattering of visual records
of students, fellow anthropologists and an occasional historian (in the
form of Leonard Thompson: see Figure 9.1). A selection of these images
features in the pages below.
There are signs of the Collection entering yet another phase of life. The
documents have been moved, along with many of the other collections
preserved in the Manuscripts and Archives Department. The new location is the main library building at UCT. The work of classifying the Collection is still far from complete. Some 40 per cent of the papers are still
being catalogued and indexed.93 Substantial new bodies of documents
are being added to the Collection. The latest addition is a voluminous
body of correspondence from Monica’s mother Jessie, including 264 letters from her husband, and 54 letters from her daughter.94 There will
doubtless be further additions of material relating to the lives, working
careers and families of Francis and Timothy Wilson in years to come,
giving the archive yet further generational depth. Existing materials are
also now being made available in new forms, notably in the case of a
Carnegie-funded project freshly underway. This involves digitising hundreds of photographic negatives taken by Monica in Pondoland, and by
Monica and Godfrey in the Bunyakyusa,95 making at least part of the
Collection available to an international readership for the first time.
93
94
95
Andrew Bank, Interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010.
Andre Landman, BC880 Wilson Family Papers – Additions 2012 (Cape Town: UCT
Libraries, 2012), 20 pp., A1.1-A1.264 David Hunter to Jessie Hunter, A5.1-A5.56
Monica/Godfrey to Jessie Hunter (only two items are from Godfrey). These letters were
unfortunately not yet open to public access at the time of the production of this book.
There are, for example, 600 negative plates of different sizes and some 400 silver prints
taken by the Wilsons in Bunyakyusa, most of them taken by Monica Wilson using
two different cameras. For a close visual analysis of this collection, see Rui Carlos de
Naronha Assubuji, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography’.
Part 1
Pondoland and the Eastern Cape
Figure P.1. The making of a woman anthropologist: the studious young Monica
Hunter at work in the Stanley Library, Girton College, c. 1930, the year in which
she completed her undergraduate degree at Cambridge having switched from
history to anthropology. She won an Anthony Wilkin scholarship which funded
her fieldwork in Pondoland and the Eastern Cape beginning the following year.
Photographer: unknown. HP, EE7 Photographs sent by Monica Hunter to her
parents, mostly of university in England.
1
Family, Friends and Mentors: Monica
Hunter at Lovedale and Cambridge,
1908–1930
Andrew Bank
In an article entitled ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History
of British Social Anthropology’ published in 1984, the Cambridgebased social anthropologist Edmund Leach criticised standard histories
of anthropology for treating cultural knowledge production exclusively
in terms of the international circulation of theoretical ideas and published texts. He called for a closer examination of the role that the personal background of social anthropologists had played in shaping their
work and orientation. In particular he called for detailed attention to
‘the geographical, ethnic, family, and class background of the individuals
concerned’.1 This chapter seeks to provide such details in the case of
Monica Hunter Wilson, and also emphasises the importance of religion
in her upbringing.
The Jewish background of many prominent social anthropologists in
southern Africa has been a major theme in recent literature.2 In an essay
published in 1996 Archie Mafeje argued that Philip Mayer’s Jewish identity explained the empathy with which he wrote about the conservative
‘Reds’ of East London in Townsmen or Tribesmen. Mafeje contrasted this
with his former mentor Monica Wilson’s sympathies for the schooled
Christian township elite when they worked together on their Langa: A
1
2
Edmund Leach, ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13 (1984), 2–3.
On Max Gluckman see Richard Brown, ‘Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia’, Journal of African History, 20, 4 (1979),
227–232; on Gluckman and his colleagues A. L. (Bill) Epstein and Abner Cohen at
the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute see Hugh Macmillan, ‘From Race to Ethnic Identity:
South Central Africa, Social Anthropology and the Shadow of the Holocaust’ in Patrick
Harries and Megan Vaughan, eds, Social Dynamics Special Issue: Essays in Commemoration of Leroy Vail, 26, 2 (Summer 2000), 87–115; on Philip and Iona Mayer see William
Beinart, ‘Speaking for Themselves’ in Andrew D. Spiegel and Patrick A. McAllister, eds,
Tradition and Transition in Southern Africa: Festschrift for Philip and Iona Mayer (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1991), 11–15, 37–38; on Adam Kuper see Isak
Niehaus, ‘Adam Kuper: An Anthropologist’s Account’ in Deborah James, Evie Plaice
and C. Toren, eds, Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts (New
York: Berghahn, 2010), 171–174. The case in relation to the female anthropologists
Ellen Hellmann and Hilda Kuper still needs to be developed.
37
38
Inside African Anthropology
Study of Social Groups in an African Township.3 Here I make a case for the
centrality of Scottish missionary Christianity in shaping her attitudes and
worldview. We can situate her, as she herself did from her first monograph
through to her retirement years, as ‘a daughter of Lovedale’.4 Her missionary parents, but especially her father David, played a formative role
with lasting consequences for her later anthropological work, including
the openness with which she related to African research assistants during
her projects in Pondoland, Bunyakyusa and Langa. Her schooling at the
racially mixed Lovedale Missionary Institution near Alice during 1918–
20 instilled in her a curiosity about African culture and a passion for
history that burgeoned during her years at Collegiate Girls’ High School
in Port Elizabeth. These rival interests played on during her undergraduate years at Girton College Cambridge as she switched during her second
year from history to social anthropology.
The second section of the chapter explores how her undergraduate
years at Cambridge developed her as a social anthropologist.5 Although
Cambridge was far more racially exclusive than Lovedale had been, she
moved in a multicultural and politically left-wing circle that encouraged
her shift towards the still highly unfashionable field of social anthropology. Here we see the value of interpersonal relations, the role of friends
and mentors. Two fellow students – a young Egyptian woman whom she
met at Girton named Munira Sadek and an older student and Communist Party of South Africa member, Eddie Roux – were great influences
given their shared interest in history and sociopolitical change in Africa.
Roux was the leader and Sadek an active member of a Labour Study
Circle that had a significant impact on her political ideas and, more
concretely, contributed to her decision to shift from history to social
anthropology. Two of her social anthropology lecturers at Cambridge,
Jack Herbert Driberg and Thomas Callan Hodson, who later supervised
her doctoral thesis, played an underacknowledged role in introducing her
to African anthropology. What is abundantly clear from Hunter’s letters
from Girton, as we shall see, is that she found Cambridge and college life
anything but restrictive. Her experience of studying social anthropology
3
4
5
Archie Mafeje, ‘A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa’, CODESRIA Bulletin, 1996
(No. 2), 6–13. Wilson and Mafeje’s collaborative work on Langa is discussed in Chapter 8.
Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique
Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press,
1973), 4; on her self-image as missionary’s daughter in her monograph see Monica
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa
(Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009 (1936), 4th edition), 12.
This latter part of the chapter is an edited and amended version of my article ‘The
Making of a Woman Anthropologist: Monica Hunter at Girton College, Cambridge,
1927–1930’, African Studies, 68, 1 (April 2009), 29–57. Thanks to African Studies for
permission to reproduce a reworked version of the article here.
Family, Friends and Mentors
39
was far from ‘stifling’, as Edmund Leach suggests of Cambridge in this
interwar period in his article cited above. The notion that she ‘sat at the
feet of Malinowski’ accords more with the training of Audrey Richards,
or indeed that of her future husband Godfrey Wilson, who was one of
Malinowski’s most favoured disciples, rather than with her own experience. She encountered his writings at Cambridge and acknowledged in
her monograph that these works had inspired her, but she remained on
the margins of the sacred circle, a ‘serious, rather silent’ presence when
she attended his seminar in 1933.6
A Lovedale Education, 1908–1921
Monica Hunter was the daughter of missionary parents, David and Jessie
Hunter (née McGregor). We know much more about her father than
about her mother, and much more about her paternal than her maternal
relationship.7 The archival documents and her later life recollections do
seem to suggest, however, that her father was very much the dominant
influence.
David Hunter (1864–1949) had grown up in a devout Methodist family in Glasgow. Hugh Macmillan locates David Hunter’s liberal Christian ideology within the religious and intellectual traditions of the Free
Church of Scotland, ‘itself a product of the movement of ideas that has
come to be known as “the Scottish Enlightenment”’. Like his Scottish
Enlightenment forebears and his Free Church peers who included
Lovedale’s best-known directors James Stewart and James Henderson,
Hunter was as deeply concerned with matters of the world as with those
of the spirit.8 This engaged form of Christianity would profoundly influence his daughter.
David’s father William owned a large iron-manufacturing business.
David attended school in Geneva and Cambridge before ill health sent
him on a series of voyages to Norway, Australia, New Zealand, the United
States, Canada and Ceylon between 1881 and 1886.9 He returned to
manage the Liverpool branch of his father’s business. He was ordained
6
7
8
9
Audrey Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Whisson and West, eds, Religion
and Social Change in Southern Africa, 3. For a fuller discussion of her relatively marginal
relationship with the Malinowski circle, see Chapter 9.
A newly uncovered stash of letters between Monica and Jessie Hunter have the potential
to offer a fuller and more balanced account of her relationship with her parents than that
presented here. They are, however, not yet open to public access.
Hugh Macmillan, ‘From “Rational Divines” to the Northern Rhodesian Mines: Christianity, Political Economy and Social Anthropology in Southern Africa’ (unpublished
paper presented at the Monica Hunter Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June
2008), 1–3.
University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives Department, BC880,
David and Jessie Hunter Papers (HP), AA1.4, David Hunter, Travel Diaries 1881, 1882,
1886.
40
Inside African Anthropology
at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Waterloo, London,10 but the real
turning point was a profound religious experience in 1893, as he later
recounted.
Some fifty years ago a mother in Scotland wished that one of her five
sons should become a medical missionary . . . One of these sons, who for
ten years had been in business in Scotland and England and out East,
was persuaded, against his inclination, to go to the Keswick Convention
[in 1893]. There he had a deep spiritual experience. One outcome was
an impulse to withdraw from business and seek to render some service
towards the extension of Christ’s kingdom in Africa.11
David spent a year travelling through southern Africa by rail, buggy,
oxwagon and on horseback, visiting mission stations throughout the
region – including those in a still-independent Pondoland, where his
daughter would later do fieldwork. His visit to Lovedale in this period
had a sequel: its longtime director James Stewart offered him a position as a lay minister with responsibility for editing the mission’s journal
The Christian Express, later known as The South African Outlook, teaching
Bible classes, working on improving communications between missionaries and Xhosa-speaking converts, and preaching and proselytising.12
In his early years he successfully raised funds from the Cape government
and friends back home in Scotland for the construction of the Victoria
Hospital at Lovedale.
In 1901 he married Jessie McGregor (1869–1949). In his letter of
blessing her missionary father William gave a glimpse of her life history.
He wrote that ‘through her mother’s departure to China, and subsequent
death, she [Jessie] had, when still very young, a heavy responsibility
thrown on her which she had faithfully and nobly discharged’.13 It seems
likely that Jessie looked after her younger siblings in Edinburgh while her
parents served as missionaries in China. These early duties might help
explain why Jessie McGregor married relatively late.
Mary Monica was the Hunters’ second child, born around 11.30 a.m.
on 3 January 1908, some two years after her brother Aylmer (pronounced
Elmer). She weighed 2.7 kilograms.14 Monica’s memories of childhood,
as related in late life to her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy, are
dominated by the figure of her father. Her earliest recollection is of his
showing her Halley’s Comet when she was just two–and–a–half.
10
11
12
13
14
HP, AA11, Copy of minutes relating to ordination of David Hunter.
HP, DD1.7, David Hunter’s Writings on Lovedale and Mission Work, David Hunter,
‘The Story of Lovedale Hospital’, handwritten ms [n.d., c. 1932]. Note: Square brackets
in references enclose a person’s name, place, date or other item that is not specified in
the text but is apparent to the author from the context.
HP, BB5, Letters from James Stewart David Hunter, 1893–1902, James Stewart/David
Hunter, 25 Sept. 1900, Edinburgh.
HP, BB6, William McGregor/David Hunter, 9 Dec. 1900, Amory, China.
HP, AA1.1 [David Hunter] Pocket Diaries, 1908.
Family, Friends and Mentors
41
I was taken by my father rolled up in a shawl which I can still see, a Shetland
shawl, brown with a lovely lace border and it smelt very nice. And I liked
being carried out by him on a cold winter night. And we went up to the
terrace in Lovedale and looked at the blooming comet in the sky. And I
remember my father saying, ‘If you live to be a very very old lady, you might
see it again, but not otherwise, because it only comes very seldom.’15
Her early childhood years were difficult. The sense of seriousness in the
Hunter household was perhaps due to her mother and father already
being 39 and 44 years of age respectively at the time of her birth and
to their devout religious beliefs. A family tragedy also played a role.
Her brother died of appendicitis when Monica was four,16 a pain that
would remain with her throughout her life. ‘The next memory is of his
[Aylmer’s] death and the funeral . . . And my father wanted me to kiss him
and, er, I knew that the corpse was not my brother. And it was terrible.’17
She linked the loss of her brother with ‘the sort of feeling that has dogged
me always of being in the way and not being wanted’. She recalls her
feelings of loneliness and fear when journeying with her parents as a
five-year-old to England and Scotland. She spoke of the ‘terror of trains
and tubes’, the awful smells of London and the deep sadness of her
mother.18
Her revival began back at home in rural Lovedale and nearby Hogsback, where her father had bought a holiday home some years earlier.
Horse-riding played an important role in her childhood, a skill she put to
use in later years as a fieldworker in Pondoland, as we shall see in the next
chapter. She recalled her father’s great skill as a rider and spoke of how,
from an early age, he would egg her on to take the reins when driving
their horse-and-carriage over the mountain to their holiday home. ‘And
from the time I was about seven or eight I used to drive the last bit up the
steep hill because I was the lightest member of the family. And my father
used to walk alongside sort of clucking encouragingly to me, and my
mother was slightly nervous at my having the horses in case they bolted
at the top.’19
‘The miracle of nature’ as expressed in a love of flowers and trees
was another dominant childhood theme. Her father instructed pupils at
Lovedale about gardening. His pupils included the Swazi King Sobhuza
15
16
17
18
19
WC, Uncatalogued CD, Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson,
‘Childhood’, Hogsback, 10 Jan. 1979. My transcription. [Henceforth Monica Wilson
interview: ‘Childhood’]. I am grateful to Francis and Lindy Wilson for permission to
use this interview. Monica died at the age of 74 in 1982, just two years before the return
of Halley’s Comet.
On the cause of death see Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’
in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 3.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’.
Ibid.
Ibid.
42
Inside African Anthropology
Figure 1.1. A wedding photograph taken on the front porch of the home of David
and Jessie Hunter at Lovedale in 1911. Monica (far left, aged 3) is being held
in the arms of her father David, with her mother Jessie standing alongside. The
importance of their Scottish ancestry is evident from the kilt worn by her brother
Aylmer (aged 5) who died just a year after this photograph was taken. The bride
is Jessie’s sister Marie and the groom is Cecil Hobart Houghton, a close family
friend. In front of the bridal pair is Betty Henderson, daughter of the Lovedale
principal. Next to Cecil is his brother Kenneth who in much later years, as
inspector of schools in the Transkei, would advise the newly graduated Monica
on her choice of field-sites in Pondoland. The small boy in front of Kenneth is
probably Betty’s younger brother, Donald.20
II and the Pondo Chief Victor Poto,21 who would give Monica permission
to do fieldwork in Western Pondoland. These Lovedale networks were
of great importance at future field-sites, as we see in Chapter 2. He
encouraged the planting of trees and experimented with new species in
the garden of their holiday home. ‘And so we grew trees. And my father
had correspondence in all corners of the world . . . he used to travel and
he brought home seeds in his pockets. And all sorts of queer things began
appearing at Hogsback . . . ’22
20
21
22
HP, EE3 Family photograph albums. Thanks to Francis Wilson for identifying the
Houghtons and Hendersons.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’.
Ibid. Monica inherited this experimental attitude towards gardening. Francis Wilson
notes that she nurtured and developed her father’s garden with such a passion that it
was one of a select number of gardens to feature (posthumously) in the Oxford Companion
to Gardens. Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’, 24.
Family, Friends and Mentors
43
Figure 1.2. Monica Wilson aged five. The photograph was taken during the family visit to England and Scotland in 1913, a year after the death of her brother.23
Her memories of home were most strongly associated with religious
instruction. She reflected that ‘the whole atmosphere of the house was
one of the deepest reverence and an awareness of the presence of God’.
This was the part of her childhood that was most closely connected with
her mother who taught her from home in her young days. ‘I knew the
Psalms, a number of the Psalms, and quite a lot of the Gospels by the
time I was old enough to go to boarding school [in Port Elizabeth]. My
mother thought that this was the best religious education possible. And I
would have said it was the best literary education possible also, because
I can still recite quite a lot of the Psalms and chunks of the Gospel.’24
She attended Lovedale Missionary School from the age of ten. The
mission station had been founded in 1824 and the school dated back
to 1841. It had always had a cross-cultural and multiracial character.25
Although ‘the over-riding concern was with training in Christian living’ and for girls this included practical training in sewing, the academic
23
24
25
HP, EE8 Photographs of Monica and family.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’.
Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’, 4; for the standard history
of the mission and its school, see also Robert H. W. Shepherd, Lovedale, South Africa,
1824–1955 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1971). A more modern history of Lovedale has
still to be written.
44
Inside African Anthropology
standard was very high in this period of its history. Lovedale had an excellent library, a botanical collection, and an ornithological collection.26
The small classes encouraged close bonds between pupils.27 She made
friends with many of her Xhosa classmates, of whom Frieda Bokwe, later
wife of her Fort Hare colleague and longtime friend Z. K. Matthews,
is the best known. Monica retrospectively traced her interest in history
to the intense debates between the schoolteacher and her Xhosa classmates about the British–Xhosa Wars of the nineteenth century. These
debates were all the more intense given the presence of Janet Maqoma,
the great-grand-daughter of one of the Xhosa chiefs who had fought
most energetically to defend his land against British invasion during the
1820s and 1830s. She herself debated with her classmates about cultural
practices and here too the dialogues were, she reflected, ‘the seed of later
ideas’.
I remember a lively discussion when I was in Standard Six [in 1920] with a
girl called Peggy Mbilini about lobola [bride-wealth]. And they [her Xhosa
class-mates] were upholding lobola. And I was saying that I really didn’t
want cattle given for me. I wanted to choose. And, er, the African girls
didn’t really believe that we married without lobola. They were extremely
sceptical of this. And we [the English-speaking pupils] were holding forth
on our ideas about marriage.28
Home learning remained important, though now in a more informal way.
Her father was deeply involved with African education, and medical and
agricultural development. He was passionate about the idea of Native
Industries and implacably opposed to the migrant labour system and the
effects it had on African morality and family life.29 His diaries record
his meetings over the years with prominent political figures including
in the early 1900s the Cape prime minister J. X. Merriman, the female
doctor Jane Waterson, the missionary anthropologist Henri Alexandre
Junod at Lovedale, and in 1925 the minister of Native Affairs J. B. M.
Hertzog. He also interacted with many visitors from other parts of Africa.
‘Bishops, and Plymouth Brethren, and all sorts of variety of characters
26
27
28
29
Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’ in Francis Wilson and Dominique
Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa, 1870–1970 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press,
1973), 8. Here she expressed a deep sense of sadness about the decline of Lovedale
during the apartheid years.
There were just seventeen pupils in her class in her second year at Lovedale. See WC,
A2.6, Personal Papers, Monica Hunter, School Report, Lovedale Missionary College,
Std. 5, 1919.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’.
His critique of migrant labour would have a long legacy in the Wilson family, being
taken up in print first by Monica Wilson in ‘The Bantu in Towns’ section of Reaction
to Conquest and elsewhere in later writings, and then at length by Francis Wilson in
Labour in the South African Goldmines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1972). On David Hunter’s economics, see his Editorial in Wilson and Perrot,
eds, Outlook on a Century, 271–80, 286–92, 304–28, 351–65.
Family, Friends and Mentors
45
used to turn up, and be entertained, irrespective of colour. And you
picked up a great deal about Africa generally.’30 These recollections and
many of the photographs of her childhood, like one of Monica and a
large gathering of adults on a picnic in the Hogsback, suggest that she
was forced, from an early age, to join the world of grown-ups. The
conversation was mostly about serious matters from African politics to
mission affairs or the mission journal.
Edinburgh, Port Elizabeth and Alice, 1921–1926
Monica spent a year at St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh in
1921 while her family was on leave. She was astonished to find that
the standards in sewing class were inferior to those at Lovedale. On
her return she was sent to board at Collegiate School for Girls in Port
Elizabeth. Her weekly letters to her father tell of a strongly anglocentric
cultural training with comments on the great celebrations associated with
British royal visits and teachers who constantly upheld English schools
and universities as models of comportment and educational standards.
They also spill over with an ever-growing passion for books and reading.31
It was at the age of fifteen that she decided she wanted to study history.
History is interesting. When I start reading it I want to go on and on and
on. It’s fatal if I have to look up something and spike on a well written
history of England. I get deep in it and forget to do my looking up. I would
like to specialise in History one day.32
She wrote at this time of being ‘deep in a life of Clive [of India]’, having
violent arguments about the reasons for Napoleon’s downfall and of her
burning desire to win the History Prize.33 Given her liberal background
and enquiring mind, it is not surprising that she criticised the settler
school of South African historiography which they encountered through
textbooks written by the likes of George McCall Theal and George Cory.
‘I don’t like Theal’s books, and he is supposed to be the man on South
African History.’34 She was also critical of the maps in Eric Walker’s
30
31
32
33
34
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’.
WC, B5.1 Letters MH to her father (David Hunter), 2 Aug. 1922–4, Dec. 1925.
There are more than a hundred surviving letters written by Monica to her father during
these four years at Collegiate Girls’ High School. They give a remarkably rich sense of
Monica as a bubbly and outgoing teenager, something that contrasts starkly with the
recollections of former students of Monica as a shy and stern professor in later years.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 3 May 1923, Port Elizabeth.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 20 March 1924, 30 July 1924, 30 Oct. 1924, Port
Elizabeth.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 26 Feb. 1925, Port Elizabeth. On Theal, Cory
and the settler school of South African historiography, see Christopher Saunders, The
Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town and
Johannesburg: David Philip, 1988), 9–46.
46
Inside African Anthropology
recently published Historical Atlas (1922). ‘I can still remember arguing
with the History mistress at the Collegiate about the accuracy of the maps
we had – that was Walker’s maps on the frontier. And I was maintaining
that he got things on the wrong sides of the river. And generally I was
extremely sceptical of the official interpretation of frontier history.’35
A Hunter of the Girton Tribe, October 1927–June 1928
In the year after matriculating from Collegiate Girls’ High, Monica
applied to Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge and to Summerville College at Oxford. Girton was clearly the first choice. She had
started studying the 12-volume Cambridge Modern History, the key text
for her exam, not long after finishing her final examinations at Collegiate
in November 1925.36 If we think of her exam preparation as a form of
female ritual seclusion with the goal of acquiring specialised knowledge,37
then the female elder who guided her initiation before she set sail for England aboard the Union Castle ship with her mother was her former history
mistress at Collegiate, a Miss Ruffel. There was also an oral component
to the exam, or at least an interview, in this case with both mother and
daughter. The history mistress at Girton, Miss Gwladys Jones, a former
hockey international and dedicated coach of young women for whom
Monica retained a lifelong sense of debt and devotion, felt that she was
‘very young’ – just 19 years 3 months at the time of the interview. But
she was admitted, and sent a celebratory single-word telegram message
to her father: ‘Girton!’38
In the months before ‘going up’, the prelude to the main initiation
rituals, Monica read for her courses and even had the time and inclination
to plan a novel. It was evidently autobiographical in inspiration. The
leading lady was a Girton girl who goes out to rural South Africa to
teach in a ‘native school’. This was her own vision of her future path. She
recorded in her pocket diary at the time: ‘It will be worth my while to
dedicate my life to training native girls.’ Once in South Africa the young
Girtonian meets two men with differing views of the ‘native question’,
a young man of somewhat wayward views and an old and wise medical
missionary with great ideals, a man clearly modelled on her father. She
35
36
37
38
WC, Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’; on Walker’s reproduction of Theal’s historical myths in his early work, see Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South
African Past 42.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 18 March 1926, Lovedale.
The idea of describing the Girton experience in terms of tribal rituals is adapted from the
description of men’s rituals in Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and
the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2005), 3–9.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 23 April 1927, Glasgow.
Family, Friends and Mentors
47
only appears to have got as far as this outline of the cast of characters, but
the novel-in-embryo is revealing of her vision of herself as a teacher-intraining and as one with a keen interest in the ‘native question’.39 When
in England she noted with relief that coming from Lovedale had a less
loaded political meaning than it did in her native South Africa.40
The main rituals of initiation took place in early October. On the first
Sunday of that month, the freshers (who numbered 61 in 1927) were
told about the ancestors by the college mistress, Helen Major. A fellow
fresher recalled that
Miss Major spoke about the great women educationalists – Emily Davies at
the heart of the movement, Barbara Bodichon the artist, Sophia Jex-Blake
the doctor, Josephine Butler the reformer, and George Eliot the novelist
who had approved [of the foundation of the college in 1869]. These women
were already becoming familiar to us, for their small portraits were along
the corridors and larger paintings of college worthies were in the hall. The
talk left me, at least, with a feeling that I had been admitted to a noble
institution.41
The initiates were formally accepted into the tribe after their ‘matriculation’ ceremony and officially signed the college register. The event ended
with the staging of the matriculation photograph on the lawn outside
the front entrance of the college. Monica sent her father a copy with a
handwritten key identifying each participant.42
In college life the language of kinship was explicit. Almost immediately
the freshers were divided into ‘families’ of eight or ten members each.
Given the peculiarity of this concept in a college setting, Monica found
it necessary to explain to her father what they meant: ‘family i.e. the
group that sits together at table and more or less knows one another’.43
As this suggests, sitting together in the dining hall for the evening meal
was the central family ritual. The senior students sat closest to the high
table and were apparently permitted, just once during their third and
final undergraduate year, to ‘dine on high’, although this fearful prospect
was softened by the possibility of being accompanied by a fellow family
member. The ‘fresher’ families, on the other hand, sat at tables on ‘the
junior side’ of the hall – the bottom end furthest from high table. The
young women were required to wear formal evening dress for these occasions. For some there was even a regular powdering before the event,
though Monica herself was not much given to cosmetics.
39
40
41
42
43
WC, A2.2, Diaries, Monica Hunter, Pocket Diary, 1927.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 13 March 1927, Cambridge.
Gwendolen Freeman, Alma Mater: Memoirs of Girton College 1926–1929 (Cambridge:
Pevensey, 1990), 14.
WC, N2, Photographs in Groups.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 13 Nov. 1927, Cambridge.
48
Inside African Anthropology
When her college mate Muriel Bradbrook spoke of Monica as having
belonged to ‘the social elite family of our year’,44 this was not a statement
about class origins – indeed, Monica’s letters home make it clear that she
saw her squarely middle-class family as quite other than aristocratic ‘High
Brows’. Instead, Muriel’s remark was both a comment on their leadership
within college and a retrospective reflection on their remarkable degree
of success in later professional life. Monica herself was president of the
Girton College branch of the League of Nations, college secretary for the
Student Christian Movement and a member of the Boat Club.
Social events in the ‘family calendar’ included the ‘jovial jug’, attended
by as many family members as possible. They were held in the private
rooms of one of the family members, usually about once a fortnight,
beginning at 9.15 or 9.30 in the evening. College histories reveal that
in earlier years there had also been gatherings known as ‘wines’, which
involved even larger parties. While the ‘jugs’ had begun in Victorian days
as cocoa-drinking parties, in the more experimental atmosphere of the
1920s the hostesses would also usually serve coffee and offer cigarettes.
Indeed, ashtrays were near-obligatory furnishings on the mantelpieces
of newly decorated college rooms. Monica’s contemporary Gwendolen
Freeman recalls that smoking was seen as a way of asserting freedom and
an expression of equality with men. Monica’s letters confirm that ‘a great
many people smoke in college – in moderation – but it is quite possible
to refrain and not be considered a freak’.45 She provided many accounts
of the ‘family jugs’, of which this was the most evocative.
There were nine of the family there (Kathleen Earp could not come) – and
Frieda Picot, the blind English student from Guernsey [who had come
as a guest]. We had an uproarious time. Munira [Sadek] brought her
gramophone and E [Elizabeth] dispersed cocoa while I dealt with the oat
cakes and toast and tried to prevent chestnuts ‘popping’ and hitting people
in the eye. Ten of us made E’s room pretty full, and we had all come in
pyjamas and dressing gowns. Having been fed, we proceeded to duck for
apples in a foot bath Elizabeth had unearthed in the gyp [maids’] wing;
then still munching we turned off the lights and Frieda told us folktales
and witch stories from the Channel Islands.46
Language, as the above extracts confirm, was a distinctive feature of
tribal life at Girton. The lingo could be general – ‘going down’, ‘going
up’, ‘May fever’, ‘dining on high’ – or specific: ‘jumping’, ‘throwing jugs’,
‘the Gyps’ wing’.
44
45
46
Girton College Archive, Memories of Muriel Bradbrook on tape (with a transcript),
compiled during the 1980s as part of the series entitled ‘Strong-Minded Dons’. Bradbrook became a well-known novelist and remained a lifelong friend of Monica’s, attending her funeral in Hogsback in 1982.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 18 Dec. 1927, Cambridge.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 4 Oct. 1928, Cambridge.
Family, Friends and Mentors
49
Jane Howarth observes that the history of women’s education at
Oxford after 1920 has been viewed in two different ways: either as ‘a
story of growth and assimilation . . . or as one of constraints of various
kinds experienced by women “implanted into a men’s society”’.47 Early
feminist literature tended to emphasise the latter, especially at Cambridge, given the ‘peculiarly mulish degree of prejudice towards women’
that lingered here into the interwar period.48 Where Oxford women
were allowed to attend the university graduation ceremonies from 1920
onwards, Monica had to wait until 1948 to receive her undergraduate
(and by now also graduate) certificates in an academic gown at a formal
ceremony. The fact that she made the long journey to Cambridge from
Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where she had taken up her first
post as departmental chair in anthropology, suggests that she saw this
long overdue expression of equality as an important milestone.49 Her
letters do convey resentment at the continued institutional discrimination against women at Cambridge. She was intensely annoyed at being
forced to sit in the visitors’ seats with her fellow Girtonians when she
went to listen to the Union sermon, for example, while the ‘hoary and
aged Dons’ occupied the pound seats.50
Yet such expressions are rare in her letters, and it is the other face of
college life – ‘growth and assimilation’ – that comes to the fore. Indeed,
the overwhelming tone of her letters is a bubbling sense of excitement
of a life lived at a lick. She was ever-reluctant to ‘go down’ and keen to
‘come up’ after holidays spent with relatives. This was partly thanks to
the independence and freedom that came with college life.
‘I Have Let Myself in for a Labour Study Circle’: Hunter,
Sadek and Roux, October 1927–November 1928
As well as its routines, not least as a world of leisure and sociability,
Girton was of course also a space of intellectual engagement. In this
sense in particular, it left a lasting imprint on Monica’s life and career.
After her first year of study she enthused: ‘I feel that in three terms I have
collected enough ideas, to keep my brain busy for at least ten years. To
me it is not what you learn that is important, but they teach you to think,
and work things out, and make you so keen.’51
This passion for learning was partly developed in her many conversations with her college mates; variously described as ‘yarning’,
47
48
49
50
51
Jane Howarth, ‘Women’ in B. Harrison, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol.
8: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon), 345–376.
Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men’s University – Though of a Mixed
Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), 1.
WC, B5.5, Corr. with Dover Wilson, J. Dover Wilson/Monica Wilson, 1948, Oxford.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, Cambridge, 15 Oct. 1928.
Ibid., Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 28 July 1928, Cambridge.
50
Inside African Anthropology
Figure 1.3. Monica sent this postcard of Girton to her father with the comment:
‘This rather jolly view of “Emily Davis Court” where we play tennis in summer.’52
‘gassing’ and ‘waxing’. ‘We are forever discussing things like race and colour problems.’53 She paints a picture of a culture of debate and openness
that obviously left a lasting impression. She was challenged on numerous occasions by her college mates for failing to be more outspoken in
defence of the missionary model of colonial development, which she
evidently held dear; she repeatedly noted the diversity of views in college
but also that the ethic was one of ‘thrashing things out’. This ethic was
strongly promoted by her much admired history mistress, Mary Gwladys
Jones, who insisted for example that she take political science classes with
a lecturer who had a viewpoint contrary to her own. Monica’s letters are
filled with valuable lessons from Miss Jones, encouraging her to work
on her writing style by reading classic histories like Edward Gibbon’s
Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, to explore the boundaries between
history and literature by studying historical novels, and also to nurture
what Jones perceived as her deep interest in racial issues in colonial
settings. With this in mind she was encouraged to write essays on ‘the
noble savage in literature’ and on ‘racial problems in contemporary South
Africa’.54
52
53
54
HP, EE7 Photographs sent by Monica Hunter (Wilson) to her parents, mostly of university in England (annotated by Monica).
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, Cambridge, 6 July 1927.
For more on the influence of Jones, see Chapter 9.
Family, Friends and Mentors
51
Figure 1.4. Portrait of Monica dating from her Girton College years.55
The social world of the college was, however, relatively restricted in the
opportunities it offered for cross-cultural contact. While the number of
‘colonials’ at Cambridge had been increasing steadily, students from the
British ‘dominions’ (as they were called then) were still a small minority.
Indians had long been the most numerous, but there were still only
about a hundred of them at Cambridge in the 1920s, just 2 per cent of
the total student population.56 African students were far less numerous.
From passing mentions in her letters I would guess there were fewer
than twenty-five students from Africa among the 4,600 undergraduates.
Gwendolen Freeman recalls that Cambridge of that era was ‘still very
much a non-multiracial society’. She recalls an argument with college
mates as to whether it was proper to behave towards an Indian man as
one would towards an Englishman.57
Even Monica, with her much more culturally diverse and open background, seems to have found some difficulty in relating to Indian men,
whom she once described as ‘bitter’ and wont to dominate political
55
56
57
HP, EE14. Packets of assorted photographs, mostly unidentified.
Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, 210.
Freeman, Alma Mater, 98.
52
Inside African Anthropology
discussions, leading her to muse at various points whether men and
women meeting together at fortnightly international teas or international conferences between terms was in fact a good thing. She described
the awkwardness on the last evening of an international conference in
Liverpool during her Easter vacation in 1928. The evening began with
people from different countries singing traditional songs: ‘Ida Russell [a
South African friend from Newnham] sang an Afrikaans thing, an Arab
went on in Arabic, and an Egyptian sang a wild revolutionary song, also
in Arabic. Indians followed’, she wrote to her father. ‘The Indians are
so like Europeans (much more so than any Bantu that I have met) that
there seems no earthly reason for regarding [treating crossed out here]
them differently, but after living at home, you know you just can’t.’ She
concluded: ‘If there were only girls together it would have been perfectly
alright, and a good many of us agreed that it would be better to have
them [conferences] for men and women separately.’58
In this relatively narrow cultural world, personal friendships could play
a crucial role in developing a deeper sense of cross-cultural connection.
One of Monica’s most significant friendships at Girton was with the only
other African student of her year, an Egyptian woman named Munira
Sadek. Monica’s friendship with Munira was a running theme through
her letters. Munira was first mentioned during Monica’s first month in
college, but they seem to have become close when attending the Liverpool conference of 1928. ‘Munira is a nice person. She, by the way, is
a rabid nationalist and rather upset by recent doings in Egypt.’59 During the summer vacation Monica introduced Munira to her relatives in
Edinburgh, Uncle Ian and Aunty Mary.
By second year they were the closest of friends. Monica now revealed
further details about her Egyptian sister. She ‘taught in Egypt for a little
before she came here. She holds a state scholarship, and is going back to
teach again. I somehow don’t think she will ever get married . . . Munira is
one of the nicest people I know, and the only non-European whom I ever
forget is not European.’60 Munira had been brought up as a Christian
rather than a Muslim, her family being members of the Coptic Church.
In January 1929 Monica shared a room with her at another international conference. ‘The key-note of the Conference was “friendship”
and in our hostel and elsewhere, we were just good friends all round –
black and white and yellow.’ Again, though, there is still evidence of
a residual paternalism in her attitude towards Africans – which I read
as a legacy of her missionary upbringing. ‘It’s much more complicated
at home . . . Rosebery Bokwe was in the hostel too, and I was proud of
58
59
60
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 20 March 1928, Cambridge.
Ibid.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 14 Nov. 1928, Cambridge.
Family, Friends and Mentors
53
Figure 1.5. Monica’s closest friend at Girton College, the Egyptian nationalist
Munira Sadek.61
Lovedale and Fort Hare. He was one of the most popular people there,
and such a contrast to some other Indians and people. He spoke for
South Africa . . . when various delegates were asked to give some account
of the S.C.M. [Student Christian Movement] in their countries and did
exceedingly well . . . I thought he was getting through remarkably quickly
for a Bantu.’62
Later that month Munira invited Monica to the Annual AngloEgyptian Tea at Cambridge, an event arranged to promote better relations between students of the two nationalities. ‘Egyptians complain that
they find themselves very much shut out from social life in England. I
think in most cases their complaint is just – they are shut out, but I do not
know what ought to be done about it. If only they were all like Munira
there would not be much difficulty.’ Monica was wrong about Munira
in just one respect: she did marry; among the relatively sparse entries in
Monica’s address book in later years, we read of a Munira Saad living in
Malarea near Cairo.63 An article in the college journal in 1933 reported
that Munira had risen very rapidly to a position of responsibility in her
61
62
63
WC, N7. Unidentified photographs.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 9 Jan. 1928, Cambridge.
WC, A2.4, Personal Papers, Address Book of Monica Wilson.
54
Inside African Anthropology
Figure 1.6. Monica’s long-standing friend, the Communist Party of South Africa
member Eddie Roux in his young days.64
home country. She was headmistress of the Tewfik Coptic School for
Girls with 520 pupils.65
An even more important friendship for Monica’s later career was
with Edward Rudolph Roux of Clare College, who is associated with
pioneering radical history in South Africa. Roux was born five years
before Monica in Pietersburg in what is now the Northern Province of
South Africa, but grew up in Johannesburg. He joined the Young Communist League in 1922, at just 19 years of age, and describes in his
autobiography how his sympathies with the aspirations of black workers through his Communist Party contacts led to arguments, alienation and eventually ostracism from his own family. While studying at
Witwatersrand University he rented a room from one of his Party comrades, Willy Brandt, and thus became ever more embroiled in the world
of urban working-class politics, being introduced to Sydney Bunting, a
man for whom he retained a lifelong devotion, and activists in the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU). Roux had begun a doctoral
thesis on plant physiology a year before Monica arrived at Girton.66
64
65
66
A2203 Eddie Roux Collection, D8, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. Thanks to Michelle Pickover for permission to reproduce this photograph.
E. S. Fegan, ‘A Near-Eastern Tour’, The Girton Review, 92 (1933), 20.
Eddie Roux and Win Roux, Rebel Pity: The Life of Eddie Roux (London: Rex Collings,
1970), 50.
Family, Friends and Mentors
55
In many ways it was an unlikely friendship. ‘Roux’, as Monica would
refer to him, was an outspoken atheist and a member of the Communist
Party of South Africa. She, as we know, was a deeply committed Christian
liberal. They met through Monica’s involvement in a Cambridge Labour
Study Circle led by Roux, which was also attended by Munira Sadek
and many other Girtonians. On 19 October 1927 Monica wrote to her
father: ‘I did my best to keep out of all political clubs’, something he
seemingly had advised, but ‘everyone persecuted you to belong to this
particular party. Now I have let myself in for a labour study circle in
Cambridge on “race” and “internationalism” (most interesting) and have
also promised to go to a Conservative meeting at the end of November
and lead a discussion on South African politics’. The fence sitting did
not last long – within a few months she commented after listening to a
Union debate that she was ‘less of a Tory than ever’. By January 1928 she
reported, ‘I, like all the other intelligent people in Girton, am wearing
scarlet and vote Labour!’67 She was elected Labour Club secretary at
Girton at the beginning of her second year but stood down due to other
responsibilities.68
I read this clarity about her affiliation to Labour as driven by the politically experienced Eddie Roux whose dialogues with Monica were conducted through the three-hour fortnightly debates in their study circle.
Roux’s programme was nothing if not ambitious.
We are going to meet once a week and do the Empire and Native races.
The general scheme of study is to follow this plan: 1. Outline of economic
position. 2. Administration. 3. Land Tenure. 4. Labour. 5. Education. 6
Social Welfare. 7. Native Movements – Nationalistic etc. and then apply
it to different groups of colonies like West Africa, Kenya and Tanganyika,
South Africa, Malay States and Hong Kong, Egypt and Sudan, Palestine
etc. Each person works up a different colony, and we discuss it at one
meeting. I am doing South Africa.69
At this stage she was still unsure about Roux. ‘I foresee we are going
to have royal battles. One man there is from Jo’burg and I believe is a
communist, but I like the girls that come from Girton awfully and they
quite understand that I am by no means a socialist.’70
Within a fortnight, though, Roux had put her on a reading programme
in what may be described as ‘Anti-imperial and Anti-capitalist Studies’
beginning with Lord Olivier’s The Anatomy of South African Misery, published that same year, 1927. Olivier’s book was a resounding critique of
the racial policies of South Africa, notably segregation, and the fearful
ideas on which they were based. He made a strong link between the
67
68
69
70
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 24 Jan. 1928, Cambridge.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 15 Oct. 1928, Cambridge.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 19 Oct. 1927, Cambridge.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 19 Oct. 1927, Cambridge.
56
Inside African Anthropology
needs of British mining capitalists in South Africa and the requirements
of racially discriminatory legislation there. Monica reported to her father,
‘I think it is extraordinarily good – especially on the economic conditions
in the Union.’71 In his autobiography Roux reflected that he still considered The Anatomy of South African Misery the most incisive critique
of segregation and white supremacist thought in South Africa. Indeed,
he had taken the title for his early radical history from the West Indian
slave proverb that served as the epigraph for Olivier’s book: ‘Time Longer
Than Rope’. This ‘first major Africanist history to emerge from South
Africa’ was already written up in draft form in 1939 but only published
in 1948.72
The paper Monica presented on South Africa to the Labour Study
Circle in November was her first formal ‘academic’ presentation. It
proved to be ‘a dreadful ordeal’ on account of ‘awfully bad stage fright’
(something that never entirely left her).73 She did discover, though, that
she and Roux were not all that far apart in their views. ‘Hitherto the
other South African and I have been eyeing one another rather askance,
each imagining the other’s point of view to be more or less the typical
colonial one, so it was rather amusing to discover that we agreed on most
points.’74
At the end of her first term, Roux asked her to work up a paper
on ‘Administration in African Colonies’ for the opening meeting of the
new year. ‘None of us from Girton went to the last meeting and the
wretched men fixed it up, and nabbed all the decent subjects like education. Exploiting female labour I call it. Bis [Bice Creighton Miller] is
all right (she is doing “Land and Labour”) for she is going to spend
Christmas in the J. H. Oldham’s house, so will be able to get heaps of
books.’75 When Monica got into a panic about her presentation, which
was supposed to include commentary on East and West Africa as well
as South Africa (but in the event did not), Creighton Miller sent her a
reading list of seven or eight books, presumably based on what she had
found on Oldham’s shelves.
By January 1928 Hunter and Roux had developed a friendship. She
described taking a ‘tramp’ with him down to Grantchester. A few weeks
later Roux gave a paper on ‘native movements in Africa’, which was
‘mainly an account of the ICU [Industrial and Commercial Workers’
Union] of which he is an ardent supporter. The general theme was that
71
72
73
74
75
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 30 Oct. 1927, Cambridge.
Saunders, Making of the South African Past, 134; Eddie Roux, Time Longer Than Rope
(London: Rex Collings, 1948).
Martin E. West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: A Memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of
South Africa, 45, 2 (1984), 208.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 20 Nov. 1927, Cambridge.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 9 Dec. 1927, Cambridge.
Family, Friends and Mentors
57
the only way to fight a repressionist native policy was to boost up native
trade unions.’76 Monica’s highly sympathetic account of African nationalist movements, and especially of the ICU and its recent strike in East
London, in her first study, Reaction to Conquest (1936), was doubtless
influenced by the insider’s view of the organisation which Eddie Roux
presented to the Labour Study Circle in February 1928.77 Roux and
the other leaders of the study circle, like Creighton Miller, made conscious attempts to connect their work with the wider world of Labour
politics in the late 1920s. Roux’s annual report on their study circle
meetings was sent by Creighton Miller to Norman Leys, another leading
ideologue of the anti-imperialist school within the Labour Party. Leys,
who had authored a number of books that criticised settler colonialism in Kenya,78 was apparently ‘rather complimentary in patches’ and
‘sent two pages of criticisms’.79 In the course of her involvement with
Labour politics, Monica would meet with other influential figures in
the Labour Party like McGregor Ross, who invited her to visit him in
Kenya.
Following Monica’s presentation on administration in Africa, the
Labour Study Circle moved on to item 3 of Roux’s programme, land
tenure. In the course of her research on the subject, Monica wrote a
lengthy questionnaire to her father in April 1928, the very month before
she first broached the subject of switching from history to anthropology
with Miss Jones. I read this as her first anthropological document. It
was headed ‘Questions on Native Land Tenure’ and was laid out with
the kind of meticulous attention to detail and thoroughness that would
become a hallmark of her later work as an anthropologist. There were ten
questions, to only a few of which David Hunter could pencil in adequate
answers. It begins: ‘1. Does a man hold his “garden” in individual ownership? 2. Has he absolute right over it? Can he fence it etc.? Can he
bequeath it to his son?’ and ended with ‘9. How can a man increase the
size of his “garden” i.e. Can a man in the Tyumie buy another patch
of land to add to his original holding. 10. Are the tenure laws the same
in Bechuanaland and Botswana as in the Union? – If not, what are the
answers there to the same [ten] questions.’80
From here, it was but a short step for Monica to take the formal
decision to switch to studying anthropology, but before we turn to this
it is necessary to give a brief account of the interactions between Hunter
and Roux in first term of the 1928–9 academic year, given the influence
76
77
78
79
80
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 9 Feb. 1928, Cambridge.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 567–573.
Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 73–77.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 27 May 1928, Cambridge.
Ibid., Attachment to letter, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 8 April 1928, Cambridge.
58
Inside African Anthropology
of this relationship on her formative years at Cambridge. She reported in
mid-October.
I have been having a regular dose of ‘Labour’ for Roux came to tea with
me yesterday. He was in Moscow for 7 weeks during the summer, as one
of about 500 delegates from 52 countries, at an international communist
conference there. I was aching to hear about it. Munira came in, and we
talked hard for a couple of hours. My impression at the end was that
communism was not so upsetting as you had thought, once you got down
to the facts . . . Anyway it was interesting to get a first-hand impression of
Russia today. Roux is at least honest, so you know where you are when you
are talking to him and get something of both sides.81
There are signs of romantic interest on Roux’s part. On 5 November
‘E. R. R.’ sent an invitation card to Monica from his Lensfield Road
address in Cambridge: ‘going to see an African film (descriptive) at the
Guildhall on Tues. 13th. I wonder whether you could come. I have an
extra ticket.’ The movie was called ‘Africa Today’. Monica took up the
invitation.
We had supper first in the K.P. [King’s Parade] Cafe – that being owned by
an old lady and considered by the mistress [Miss Major] as a place in which
it was suitable for me to dine out with a young man! The pictures were
awfully good. Roux and I really behaved badly, commenting and talking
all the way through . . . Imagine bobbing up and down when a picture of
Lovedale or Jo’burg came on the film – ‘Oh you see that?’ – and just round
the corner there’s –, and that there –, and (me grand crescendo and nearly
out of my seat –) ‘if that is not the main avenue with our house just around
the corner?’ The people must have thought us quite mad. There were half
a dozen or so pictures of Lovedale – some classes, and students coming
back after the vac, and one or two whom I recognised. I did enjoy myself.
It was so nice going with someone with whom you could talk undiluted
S. Africa. Roux is a nice person too – a thorough gentleman in the proper
sense of the word.82
Roux moved down to London a month or two later and was back in
South Africa by the middle of 1929, working for the Communist Party
in Johannesburg and looking for a job as a lecturer in botany. His last
letter to Monica was written from Durban over a year later, in which he
indicated that he was due to stand trial for defying a banning order.83
By now their private and political lives had begun to move apart. He was
still romantically interested (reading between the lines) but she kept him
at a distance, especially as she had met Godfrey, her future husband, a
81
82
83
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 21 Oct. 1928, Cambridge.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 14 Nov. 1928, Cambridge.
WC, B6.15, Corr. with Eddie Roux, Eddie Roux/Monica Hunter, 5 Dec. 1931, Cambridge.
Family, Friends and Mentors
59
month before seeing Roux again at a workshop in Geneva organised by
the British Universities League of Nations Society.84
In upshot, the personal and intellectual relationship with the politically
experienced Eddie Roux was an essential prelude to Monica’s decision
to turn from history to anthropology at Cambridge, which had obvious
implications for her later life and career. It was Eddie’s loan of Lord
Olivier’s book that was so seminal, plus the fact that he shared his knowledge of urban African life and political movements with her, cajoled her
into presenting papers to their study circle or doing background research
for their meetings, and even reported to her on his trip to Moscow.
Social Anthropology at Cambridge: Hunter, Driberg and
Hodson, March 1929–June 1930
While Roux made no mention of Monica in his autobiography, she did
talk about him in a late life interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson. She
associated him with her decision to read anthropology in the second half
of her Tripos.
I remember very well in Cambridge, er, I had gone with Eddie Roux,
who was a Communist, to a meeting of the Heretics Club at which J. H.
Driberg was speaking. He was the lecturer in African anthropology, and he
was very rude about missionaries in his lecture. So Eddie took me along
to speak to him afterwards, and I had said to him, ‘Introduce me as a
missionary’s daughter,’ which he did. And Driberg was horrified and said:
‘Why, I didn’t mean anything personally insulting in any way’ [rushed,
apologetic tone of voice] And I said: ‘Oh no, I am quite used to it. I am
not upset.’ [light tone] And, er, Eddie said: ‘Miss Hunter’s going to read
Anthropology next year.’ And Driberg said ‘Oh. I don’t believe in teaching
missionaries. It makes them too damned efficient.’ [in an authoritarian
and heavily moralising tone of voice] And I said genially to him: ‘But I am
not going to be a missionary. I just want to know about the people.’ And
he looked at me with extreme suspicion. But he couldn’t exclude me from
his classes. A lecturer hasn’t the right to do that in Cambridge. And so I
turned up in his classes.85
Sir Robert Thorne Coryndon, the governor of Uganda, praised Driberg
in the foreword to his monograph The Lango for his fluency in the Lango
language, his comprehensive and meticulous documentation of tribal
life, and, above all perhaps, the practical utility of his study: ‘The broad
84
85
Francis Wilson, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’, 7.
WC, uncatalogued CD, Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, ‘Pondoland’, Hogsback, July 1979, my transcription. Henceforth Monica Wilson interview:
‘Pondoland’. Jack Herbert Driberg came to social anthropology via the Colonial Office.
Between 1912 and 1917 he had worked as a native administrator in eastern Uganda
and then spent some time working in Sudan. His first major work was a 438-page
monograph entitled The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1923).
60
Inside African Anthropology
viewpoint shows the author to be at once a sympathetic administrator
and anything but a visionary – a muscular student, in fact.’86
It is difficult to judge how accurately Monica recalled her first
encounter with this ‘muscular student’, nearly fifty years after the event.
There is no doubt that Driberg was outspokenly critical of missionaries
and it is fair to assume that this would have been a theme in his lecture.
A book he published just a year or two later launches something of a
crusade against the missionaries.87 Her account of their conversation,
however, rings somewhat false. I find it implausible that Driberg – then
approaching the height of his scholarly career – would have felt apologetic about his views, or threatened in any way by a young woman student
whose father happened to be a missionary. I am also sceptical about her
claim that he actively wished to exclude women students from his lectures. There were Cambridge lecturers of that sort and Monica did recall
him being so ‘shocking’ in his lectures on African sexuality that the only
other woman student in the class dropped the course, but nevertheless
she later admitted that ‘he took quite a lot of trouble’.88 Driberg’s own
writings confirm my suspicions. In his book At Home with the Savage, also
published not long after Monica’s classes with him, Driberg argued that
there was a role for women anthropologists, although he made it very
clear that this was a subsidiary one. His tone is strikingly paternalistic.
There is scope, therefore, within limits, for women anthropologists who
should investigate only the specifically female elements of the culture and
should supplement rather than compete with the work of male anthropologists: for with a great deal of the male organisation of a tribe, and certainly
on its more esoteric side [read: the sexual practices of secret societies], they
would be as much out of their depth as a man would be with the women’s
share of social activities. There are also, for those that like such things, possible lines of comparative research which women might undertake, such as
the conditions of birth, diet and infant education.89
Driberg’s concept of women’s fieldwork was not all that unusual. Audrey
Richards claimed that Malinowski was inclined to the view that women
anthropologists should focus on women’s issues. There is strong evidence
to suggest that many women anthropologists of that generation internalised this view. Richards’s fellow Newnhamite, Camilla Wedgwood, for
example, wrote from the field that she was ‘keeping to the position of
86
87
88
89
Robert T. Coryndon, ‘Foreword’ in Driberg, Lango, 5.
Jack Herbert Driberg, The East African Problem (London: Williams and Norgate, 1930),
13, 59.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Jack Herbert Driberg, At Home with the Savage (London: George Routledge and Sons,
1932), 32.
Family, Friends and Mentors
61
being a woman principally interested in women’s things’.90 Monica’s
early letters from Pondoland indicate that she too saw women’s issues as
the focus of her Pondoland study during the early phases of her fieldwork
and this indeed was the theme of her earliest articles on Pondo culture.91
Driberg should also be credited with having introduced Monica to the
functionalist theory of anthropology and the method of participant observation. He had studied in London under Malinowski in 1926, together
with Isaac Schapera. In the introductory chapter of At Home with the
Savage (1932) he outlined ‘The Scope and Function of Anthropology’
in terms that directly echoed his mentor. ‘Culture’ was a complex ‘living
and working organism’, made up of different parts and it was the role of
the anthropologist to discover ‘what functions these customs [or parts]
have’. The following chapter, ‘In the Field’, championed the Malinowskian method, contrasting it with the ways of the old armchair anthropologists. ‘A year or two years of intimacy will give amazing results, but
it must be complete intimacy in which we are prepared to share in all
the pursuits of our hosts: to play their games: to eat their food; to live, in
short, as they do.’92
This enthusiasm for fieldwork surely did have some influence on the
young Monica, who would later become famous for the meticulous
and energetic quality of her work in the field. There are direct echoes
of his language of ‘intimacy’ in her earliest journal articles.93 At the
very least, Driberg should be credited with introducing Monica to the
existing anthropological literature on southern Africa. His generously
acknowledged role in shepherding Isaac Schapera’s The Khoisan Peoples
of South Africa through to publication in London confirms that he was
well acquainted with regional anthropological issues and had collaborated closely with young Schapera. A co-authored introductory note to
the book indicates that the two men envisaged the volume as the ‘first
of a series designed to provide in a scientific manner a comprehensive
survey of what is at present known about the racial characters, cultures
and languages of the native peoples of Africa’.94 For whatever reasons,
their collaboration did not last, but there is little doubt that Schapera’s
then study-in-the-making was the main textbook for Monica’s courses in
90
91
92
93
94
Nancy Lutkehaus, ‘“She Was So Cambridge”: Camilla Wedgwood and the History of
Women in British Social Anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 13, 4 (1986), 786.
Monica Hunter, ‘Results of Culture Contact on the Pondo and Xosa Family’, South
African Journal of Science, 24 (1932), 681–686 and especially Monica Hunter, ‘The
Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo Women’, Africa, 6, 3 (1933),
259–276. See also Monica Hunter, ‘Review of Valenge Women by E. Dora Earthy’,
Africa, 7, 1 (Jan. 1934), 110–112.
Driberg, At Home with the Savage, 34–35.
Monica Hunter, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, Africa, 7, 3 (July 1934), 341.
Isaac Schapera, The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1930), v.
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African anthropology. No fewer than six of the ten questions in her May
1930 final examination were on, or related to, Khoisan culture.95
Her decision to take up anthropology had been made some months
before attending Driberg’s lecture with Eddie Roux. The thinking behind
her choice is set out in detail in a letter to her father, penned on 6 May
1928.
On Friday, I went along to Miss Jones and rather in fear and trembling
broached the subject of doing anthropology in my third year, instead of
history. She leapt upon the proposal, thought it a splendid plan, and thinks
I could teach and get a job perfectly well on Part I History . . . In anthropology, the skull measuring wash is mostly being cut out now, and I would be
able to concentrate on social anthropology, which would give me a good
background for beginning to study Bantu Social customs, and could well
be combined with teaching in a native school, or (if I am lucky) at Fort
Hare.96
When she mentioned her idea to Hester Laws, the only other Girtonian
who was reading anthropology, Hester informed Driberg’s older colleague Thomas Callan Hodson. Hodson came rushing over to enquire
about the new ‘possible’ and Monica could not fail to note his enthusiasm. ‘He’s really mad about his subject . . . The Cape is the district for
special study in 1929–30 (when I would be reading anthropology) so it
really looks as if I were meant to do it . . . Anthropology would be more
helpful than history in “vocational training”. I hope you will agree.’ To
Monica’s ‘most awful relief ’ her father supported her proposal. In her
next letter she put forward another argument in its favour. ‘I am sure
that I shan’t want to teach for always and always, and anthropological
research is a thing I can do on my own, if I can’t get a job near, and you
want me home any time.’97
Hodson had succeeded Alfred Cort Haddon as Cambridge University’s Reader in Ethnology in 1926. He had trained in the Indian Civil
Service (1894–1901) and published four books on India: a grammar
of an Indian language in 1906, two tribal ethnographies in 1908 and
1911, and a more general study entitled The Primitive Culture of India in
1922. He had lectured in Michigan and Oxford prior to his Cambridge
appointment.98
Monica began her anthropological studies in the last term of her second
year. Her letters to her father run dry at almost exactly this point (partly
95
96
97
98
Cambridge University Examination Papers: Michaelmas Term 1929 to Easter Term 1930,
vol. 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 1179.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 6 May 1928, Cambridge.
Ibid., Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 3 May 1928, Cambridge, 24 May 1928, Cambridge.
Who Was Who, vol. 5, 1951–1960 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1984, 4th edition).
Family, Friends and Mentors
63
because her parents came over to visit in the summer holiday), but
her study programme can be pieced together from other sources. Her
Cambridge Pocket Diary records her lecture schedule for the term. On
Mondays and Fridays she had an hour-long lecture on prehistory with
Miles Crawford Burkitt (1890–1971), then still in the position of temporary lecturer in the subject, as well as a practical with Burkitt for an
hour on Thursday afternoon. She had met with him a year earlier at his
public lecture to the newly formed Anthropology Club.
Last night I went to an Anthropology lecture by a man just returned from
South Africa. He was sent out from here to study bushman drawings, and
flints and things and made an extensive tour. He had been captivated by
South Africa (which fair endeared him to me on the spot) and gave a most
fascinating lecture. I was nearly out of my seat when he came to relate how
he had made wonderful finds at Middledrift [some 30 kilometres from
Lovedale], and had picked a choice specimen out of the sloot in front of
the hotel [in Alice]! There were other men there who had been studying
Anthropology in South Africa and you positively breathed an atmosphere
of hominess. It was refreshing.99
On Tuesdays and Thursdays she attended lectures by Hodson, one on
general anthropology and the other on social anthropology. Hodson was
also her tutor. Despite his lack of any firsthand knowledge of anthropology in Africa, he was an empirical ethnographer given to detail and close
observation. In this sense it is likely that he did play some role in shaping Monica’s approach. At the end of her life she still warmly recalled
working with him on specific texts in her undergraduate years.
One splendid piece of advice that Hodson gave me was this: that actual
cases are far more worthwhile than generalisations. And he showed the
difference between Junod’s, er, work [Life of a South African Tribe], and
Smith and Dale on the Ila [The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia].
Dale was an administrator and Smith a missionary. And Smith and Dale
were full of concrete cases. And so Hodson had said collect all the cases
you can.100
He was also influential in a more practical sense, giving personal support
to the sole female student in his small class. There were only about a
dozen anthropology students in her year, although that number would
rise significantly by 1935.101 Hodson gave her advice about preparing for
her Tripos exams, and on the strength of her first-class pass he suggested
she apply for an Anthony Wilkin Scholarship – which she won, providing
the funding for her fieldwork in Pondoland in 1931 and 1932. As her
99
100
101
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter to David Hunter, 27 Nov. 1927.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Cape Town Libraries, BC290,
Goodwin Papers, Letters from A. C. Haddon to John Goodwin, 1929, 1935.
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Inside African Anthropology
fieldwork neared completion two years later, he wrote glowing recommendations that ensured she was accepted as a doctoral student and got
a place in residence for three further terms at Girton. He even offered
£25 of his own salary towards her college fees.102 Reaction to Conquest
included a heartfelt acknowledgment ‘To Professor Hodson to whom I
owe my training in anthropology, the stimulus to undertake fieldwork,
support in obtaining the necessary funds, constant aid and encouragement while I was in the field, and help in the preparation of this book.’103
Conclusion
There is of course already a literature dealing with aspects of Monica
Hunter Wilson’s personal life. Reading this literature, we may identify two
important phases in seeing her life as a narrative. The first phase dates to
the decade between her retirement as Professor of Social Anthropology at
UCT and the year immediately after her death at Hogsback in 1982 when
former students wrote obituaries. I see the intense interest in Monica’s
biography and scholarship in recent years as the second phase, associated
in part with the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference of 2008.
Monica herself was of course influential in crafting a certain kind of
narrative about her life. Writing in 1973 from Hogsback, her beloved
childhood holiday retreat and by then retirement home Hunterstoun,
Monica told a version of her history in which the spaces of her childhood and early schooling loomed large. Defining herself as ‘a daughter
of Lovedale’, she focused in particular on the unusual racially liberal
atmosphere of twentieth-century Lovedale, the influence of her schooling along with Xhosa students and the challenge that posed to the standard white mythologies about frontier history. In the series of late-life
interviews with her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy in 1979,
she again told her life story as one that unfolded in the shadow of the
Amatolas, so to speak, with her father and her Xhosa schoolmates prominent as religious and political influences. Francis’s introduction to one
of the recordings suggests they were conceived as ‘the autobiography of
Monica Wilson’, one that remained unwritten.104
From this first phase, her former students in social anthropology at
UCT helped to evoke what their former mentor was like. Their memories
of her were strongly coloured by personal encounters with her as a supervisor and the senior professor in the Social Anthropology Department.
102
103
104
Girton College Archive, GCAC 2/4/1/8, T. C. Hodson/The Mistress of Girton College,
7 June 1932, Cambridge.
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, xi.
‘Second side of first tape continuing the autobiography of Monica Wilson’: Francis
Wilson at the beginning of Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Family, Friends and Mentors
65
Martin West, David Brokensha and Colin Murray recall her as a serious
presence in their obituary articles. For West in particular the emphasis
was on the ‘exceptional discipline’ and exacting scholarly standards of a
deeply private person who presented a determined but somewhat grim
face to the world (even though there was warmth and compassion behind
it).105 He tells of nervous students shaking outside her office and that,
given her ‘tough and chilly’ bearing, ‘many stood in awe of her and some
[were] not a little frightened’.106
While this austere image was doubtless partly true of Monica in her
mature years, this chapter has sought to capture a very different side of
her personality. Tracing her story from early childhood I have tried to
highlight her vulnerability rather than her authority, her bubbling spontaneity rather than her discipline, and her ever-pushing of the boundaries
of what she knew and what she could do rather than her entrapment in
a stifling and frustrating institutional and political culture.
Heeding Edmund Leach’s call for close attention to personal background in the history of social anthropology, I have argued for the special
importance of family, friends and mentors in her development from missionary’s daughter to Cambridge graduate. The most significant influence was her father David Hunter, the Scottish businessman turned missionary. His Christian liberal racial ideology, shared by his wife Mary,
remained the bedrock of Monica’s worldview throughout her life. She
was directly influenced by his ideas on social and economic change in
Africa, notably the negative impact of migrant labour and the positive
role that rural-based development could play, and especially by his ethos
of open engagement with African students, colleagues and visitors. Above
all, he saw his dearly beloved daughter’s intellectual abilities and independent spirit and encouraged her to develop them at every turn. He
prodded her to go for Girton College in Cambridge (where he had been
schooled) even though some of her high school teachers doubted her
abilities. He made her keep a record of her accounts at high school and
manage her own finances at Cambridge, and encouraged her to engage
in religious and political life, which she did with great passion. Her Cambridge letters do have a sense of initiation about them, something of a
deep personal intensity getting to grips with a new world.
The friends at the centre of this narrative are her Egyptian college
mate Munira Sadek and the Communist Party of South Africa member
Edward Rudolph Roux, whose intellectual engagement with her as a
105
106
West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson’; David Brokensha, ‘Monica Wilson 1908–1982: An
Appreciation’, Africa, 53, 3 (1983), 83–87; Colin Murray, ‘“So Truth Be in the Field
. . . ”: A Short Appreciation of Monica Wilson’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10,
1 (1983), 129–130.
West, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson’, 208.
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Inside African Anthropology
Cambridge student was arguably a decisive factor behind her shift in
career path.Hodson, although her other lecturer in African anthropology
Jack Driberg also played a role by introducing her to this new subject
and functionalist theory. She ‘went up’ planning to become a teacher of
history in her home area, a passion instilled at Lovedale and developed
during her years at the more mainstream Collegiate Girls’ High in Port
Elizabeth. Roux provoked and encouraged her to think about South
African history in a different, more radical, way through his sociologically
developed understanding of the wider underlying forces shaping that
society. She ‘came down’ as a young woman looking to do fieldwork and
contribute to a literature about African cultures in her home region.
The mentor who nurtured Monica was her Cambridge tutor and then
supervisor Thomas Callan Hodson. While Hodson was no towering figure in the history of social anthropology – nothing like Malinowski, with
whom Monica’s training has mistakenly been too closely associated – he
had an influence as much personal as intellectual. He was a great enthusiast for social anthropology when it was still a marginal field of study,
with no more than a dozen students at Cambridge at that time. He took
a direct interest in her as an undergraduate, encouraged her to follow
through her decision to switch to African anthropology in the middle of
her degree, and got her to write essays on aspects of African culture. He
would later help her shift from student to fieldworker by raising funds
for her at Cambridge and advising her about the importance of empirical
method in fieldwork. In hindsight she might have regarded him as ‘light
weight’ (see Chapter 9), and admittedly his training was in India rather
than Africa; but it is telling that she opens her famous monograph Reaction to Conquest with such a profound acknowledgment of his role in her
training. This is a sharp reminder that the affective, the personal, can be
as fundamental as the abstract, the theoretical, in the shaping of cultural
knowledge production.
2
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork: Monica
Hunter and Her African Assistants,
Pondoland and the Eastern Cape,
1931–1932
Andrew Bank
In an article published some twenty years ago, Roger Sanjek called
for ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’ to be exposed.1 By this he
meant uncovering the hidden history of the ‘remarkable contribution’
of research assistants – ‘mainly persons of colour’ – towards the making
of anthropological knowledge. In no major treatment of the discipline, he
lamented, was the role of these ‘major providers of information, translation, fieldnotes, and fieldwork’ portrayed as fundamental. He ambitiously
tracked relationships between anthropologists and their research assistants through different phases and on a global scale, concluding:
In 1993, it seems to me no longer possible that the history of anthropology should be taught without including in it Ahuia Ova, George Hunt,
Billy Williams, Francis La Flesche, James Murie, I Made Kaler, Alfonso
Villa Rojas, Juan Rosales, A. B. Quartey-Papafio, the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute African staff members . . . and other assistants and native scholars
who were producers of our ethnographic heritage and history.2
In recent years there has been marked progress in remedying this imbalance, particularly in histories of African anthropology. Lyn Schumaker’s
seminal study, Africanizing Anthropology, places the role of African
research assistants and anthropologists at the centre of analysis. As noted
in the Introduction, Schumaker makes a powerful case for studying the
history of anthropology ‘from the tent’ rather than from the university
office or library; she emphasises anthropology as a practice, as actions and
1
2
Apart from minor textual changes, this chapter is a reproduction in full and with permission of my article: Andrew Bank, ‘The “Intimate Politics” of Fieldwork: Monica
Hunter and her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–32’, Journal
of Southern African Studies, 34, 3 (2008), 557–574. The section on East London overlaps
with the fuller treatment of this part of her fieldwork in Chapter 3.
Roger Sanjek, ‘Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and their Ethnographers’,
Anthropology Today, 9, 2 (April 1993), 13, 16. As noted in the Introduction, I am now
of the view that Roger Sanjek’s concept of ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’ is too
blunt a framing concept for the complex and historically varied relationships between
anthropologists and their research assistants, as the essays in this volume illustrate in
relation to the career of just one anthropologist.
67
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Inside African Anthropology
events in the field rather than simply a corpus of knowledge published by
scholars in journals or monographs. This shift of perspective allows us to
examine in much more detailed terms how anthropological knowledge
was produced in its African contexts. Schumaker moves a new cast of
characters centre-stage – including, in the case of the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute (RLI) from the late 1930s to the 1950s, Matshakaza Blackson
Lukhero, Benjamin Shipopa, Rafael Almakio Mvula, Dyson Dadirayi
Mahaci, Rajabu Kimpulula, Joachim Lengwe, Davidson Silwesa Sianya,
Sykes Ndilila and others. These men were active collaborators in the ‘coproduction of scientific knowledge’, but also individuals with their own
skills, ideas and motivations.3
In his reconstructions of the pioneering fieldwork and writings of the
Swiss missionary anthropologist Henri Alexandre Junod, Patrick Harries
documents the crucial role played by Elias (‘Spoon’) Libombo, among
others. Harries shows how Libombo’s expert assistance as a butterfly collector was carried forward into Junod’s ethnographic work and was to play
a decisive role in transforming Junod’s attitudes towards Tsonga religion.
Jeff Guy argues likewise in relation to the Zulu research assistant William
Ngidi, who made a crucial contribution to the ‘heretical’ transformation
in the worldview of that proto-anthropologist, Bishop William Colenso.4
Scholars exploring the histories of other disciplines emerging in southern Africa during the early and mid-twentieth century have similarly
emphasised the need to come to terms with the contributions of African
research assistants. Nick Shepherd has thrown light on the shadowy figures lurking on the margins of the University of Cape Town archaeologist
John Goodwin’s photographs and notebooks, notably Adam Windwaai,
who worked with Goodwin at Oakhurst Cave in the southern Cape in
the 1930s, and Justus Akeredolu, who collaborated with him in Nigeria
in the 1950s.5 Leslie Witz has documented the relationship between
Guy Chester Shortbridge and Nicolas Arends in a more established
discipline where knowledge was typically seen to be discovered rather
than produced: natural history.6
3
4
5
6
Lyn Schumaker, ‘A Tent with a View’, 1–21, 152–226.
Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians, 136–137, 219–232; Jeff Guy, ‘Class, Imperialism and Literary Criticism: William Ngidi, John Colenso and Matthew Arnold’, Journal
of Southern African Studies, 23, 2 (1997), 219–241.
Nick Shepherd, ‘“When the Hand That Holds the Trowel Is Black”: Disciplinary Practices of Self-Representation and the Issue of “Native” Labour in Archaeology’, Journal
of Social Archaeology, 3, 3 (2003), 334–352.
Leslie Witz, ‘The Making of an Animal Biography: Huberta’s Journey into South African
Natural History, 1928–1932’, Kronos: A Journal of Cape History, 30 (November 2004),
147, 153–154. For a wonderfully vivid recreation of the fieldwork relationship between a
naturalist and his assistant in the nineteenth century, see Jane R. Camerini, ‘Wallace in
the Field’, Osiris, 11 (1996), 44–65. See also Rosalyn Shanafelt, ‘How Charles Darwin
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
69
Nancy Jacobs’s work on the history of African ornithology foregrounds
the major contributions of African assistants like Salimu Asmani of Tanzania, Njero Kicho of Kenya, and Jali Makawa of Malawi and Zambia.
As noted in the Introduction, Jacobs explores what she calls the ‘intimate
politics of knowledge’ in African ornithology. Close and constant interpersonal interaction in the field produced a form of intimacy, notably
in a case such as George Latimer Bates’s relationships with his research
assistants in West Africa, but this intimacy was always bounded by the
politics of race in the colonial African context.7 To a greater extent than
other scholars, Jacobs has also drawn attention to the motivations of
African research assistants. Reading their own fieldnotes, she argues that
some of these assistants were driven less by financial inducements than
by a passion for knowledge for its own sake; they saw themselves working
not merely for the metropolitan scientists who employed them, but in the
service of science itself.8
This chapter applies themes in this rich literature to Monica’s fieldwork
practice in Pondoland and the Eastern Cape: a much fuller appreciation
of the collaborative role played by African assistants in the production
of knowledge; a recovery of the agency and life histories of these partially obscured figures; and an exploration of the complex relationships
between Monica and her assistants at the various sites where she worked.
What is new here is that the researcher, unlike Goodwin, Shortbridge,
Bates and the directors of the RLI (Elizabeth Colson excepted), was a
woman; and a very young woman at that – only 23 years old when she
began her fieldwork in February 1931. Also unique is that three of her
African collaborators were women, including her main research assistant
in Pondoland.
My primary interest is in reconstructing how a famous ethnographic
work resulted from the complex and intricate social interactions that
contributed to its production. The ‘view from the tent’, or in this instance
the trading store, demonstrates just how thoroughly collaborative this
process was at every stage, although in ways that differed according to
the identities of the research assistants and the specifics of each field-site.
Only secondarily, and especially in the concluding section, do I detail
how and why Monica very largely wrote this ‘intimate politics’ out of her
celebrated monograph.
A word needs to be said about my sources in the Wilson Collection. I
have used the diaries of Monica’s father David to pinpoint the dates of
7
8
Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People Who Helped Him)’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 4 (2003), 815–842.
Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, 564–603.
Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘Servants to Science’.
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Inside African Anthropology
her successive field trips. The voluminous and hitherto unused folders of
fieldnotes provide constant on-site information about her research assistants and their role in her work, as well as the attitudes of informants and
communities towards them.9 There is also the occasional correspondence from the field and, finally, the interview with Monica by her son
Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy, conducted in July 1979 specifically
on her Pondoland research. This recording offers a freshness and access
to the tone and texture of her attitudes towards her research assistants
that no documentary source can reproduce.10
‘A Fingo Girl of My Own Age’: Auckland Village, Cape
Province, February–April 1931
Monica chose Auckland Village, or e-Hala, as the place to begin her
fieldwork. This was a matter of convenience. Auckland Village is only
25 kilometres from Lovedale, where she had grown up, and five or six
kilometres by road in the valley below the Hunter family’s holiday home
at Hunterstoun in the Hogsback Mountains. She had travelled past this
village in the valley, with its five or six hundred inhabitants, many times
en route to their mountain retreat. Her schooling at Lovedale, as she
would later recall, had nurtured in her a keen interest in frontier history
and in Xhosa and Mfengu cultural life: ‘You see I’d looked at the outside of communities for years. I had travelled around Auckland and the
countryside, and so often wondered what went on.’11
It was this curiosity, born of personal experience as much as any theoretical training, that drove Monica’s early fieldwork – and helps to explain
the richly detailed empirical form it eventually took. In her final year
of undergraduate study at Cambridge University as was described in
detail in the previous chapter, she had taken courses on the anthropology of southern Africa under Jack Herbert Driberg, a former student of
Malinowski’s who had recently worked in active collaboration with Isaac
Schapera, and on social anthropological method with Thomas Callan
Hodson, a relatively well-recognised ethnographer who had cut his teeth
in the Indian Civil Service.12 On the advice of the enthusiastic Hodson,
she had applied for (and was duly awarded) the prestigious Anthony
Wilkin Scholarship after finishing her Tripos in 1930.
9
10
11
12
There are some 25 folders that collectively contain thousands of pages or slips of paper,
mostly handwritten but many typed. Thankfully, these folders have Monica’s own labels
on the outside.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. See Chapter 1 for earlier references.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
On the hitherto underacknowledged role of her Cambridge undergraduate training on
her career, see Chapter 1.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
71
Monica’s youth explains why she chose to begin at a site so close to
home. Her parents were understandably concerned about her working
alone. Her father David had been a missionary at Lovedale for the past
36 years and would undoubtedly have been well acquainted with Mr
and Mrs Argyle, who ran the store in Auckland Village. This was where
Monica set to work, as she explained in an essay published in The Girton
Review just a few months after her return from the field.
An attempt to study a section of the social changes produced by contact,
‘the effects of contact with Europeans on the life of Bantu women’, seemed
intriguing. I thought it would be fun to try. One felt like a rat being confronted with an Everest of cheese, and wondered where to begin nibbling.
The cheese is in various stages of maturity – or decay.
A room was available in the store of a village, and I spent days sitting on
a maize sack watching the women come in to buy soap and matches, and
listening as they chose dress lengths of print . . . The store was the social
club for the village. Girls met their boys there. Boys who returned from
the mines with money would buy packets of sugar, and squat with the best
girls on the verandah to eat it . . . I sat on the maize sack and listened.13
While she reminisced in much later years of ‘having a horse and riding the
15 miles back home’ on Friday afternoon and then ‘coming back [to her
field-site] on Sunday’ evenings,14 her father’s personal diary tells a less
independent story. He records having fetched Monica from Auckland or
taken her there on 12 and 25 February 1931, as well as on 1, 4, 7, 8, 15,
21 and 26 March. The recently acquired family Buick would have been
the mode of transport. When he took ill in April, an assistant named
only as Pilson did the fetching and carrying: ‘7 April: In bed. Pilson took
car with Moché [Monica’s nickname to those close to her] to Auckland
and brought Jess [Monica’s mother] back . . . 26 April Pilson took Moché
back to Auckland in our car.’ His cash expenses page indicates that he
paid Argyle £10 at the end of April for Monica’s board.15
While Monica wrote in later years of her childhood memories of the
beautiful sounds of Xhosa hymns sung at services in Lovedale, she explicitly recalled in her 1936 book that she was ‘not fluent in Xhosa’ when
she began in the field.16 Many of the Mfengu (Fingo) villagers, however,
would have had some knowledge of the English language, given their
close proximity to colonial farms and a long history of mission activity
13
14
15
16
Monica Hunter, ‘In Pondoland’, The Girton Review, 92 (Easter Term 1933), 27.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
HP, AA1, Diary of David Hunter for 1930.
Monica Wilson, ‘Lovedale: Instrument of Peace’, 6; Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest
(Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008 (1936), 4th edition), 12.
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Inside African Anthropology
in the village. In fact, English may well have been the medium of communication on her visits to ‘a number of the people I had known since
childhood . . . I spent days chatting in their huts. I played with the children, sat through their all-night concerts in the school house, joined the
women when they went to build the hut for the boys to be circumcised
that year.’17
When she ventured beyond the store and the huts of childhood friends,
a mediator was needed to assist in the work of administering questionnaires and gathering genealogical and cultural data. In one of the first
articles she published after her fieldwork, Monica made passing mention of the contribution of ‘the local schoolmistress, a Fingo girl of my
own age’.18 Her fieldnotes from Auckland list the names of many of her
informants – after all, she knew many of the families from childhood –
but not that of her research assistant. In a retrospectively typed note
produced in the course of writing up materials for an article rather than
in the field, she recorded a few further details about her first research
assistant. ‘The woman teacher in Auckland, a girl of twenty-two, went
about with older women in the location, was received with respect in
every umzi [homestead], and was listened to with more deference than
an ordinary girl of her age.’ Yet her friend had evidently learnt the lessons of paying due deference to her elders from experience as Monica
went on to note that ‘undue presumption towards elders from educated
youngsters is not tolerated. The woman teacher of Auckland was once
thrashed by older women of the location because she was not sufficiently
deferential towards them, and when I was there she was always very particular to use to her elders the status terms due to seniors.’19 Sadly, there
are no further details about this Mfengu research assistant. What roles
did she play in Monica’s early fieldwork? Did she not provide Monica
with a crash-course in Xhosa? She evidently acted as a broker in the
tricky matters of cultural etiquette, but to what extent did she influence
Monica’s ideas about African culture?
‘Mrs D. Was a Frightful Brick’: Ntibane, Western
Pondoland, May–November 1931
After three months in Auckland, Monica had come to the view that
the community was already too culturally and racially mixed for her
to acquire a clear enough sense of the process of ‘culture contact’.
17
18
19
Monica Hunter, ‘Methods of Study of Culture Contact’, 336.
Ibid.
WC, H2.2 Research in Auckland, Victoria East District: Fieldnotes, draft, TSS. We
know it was retrospective because she only acquired a (Corona) typewriter as a Christmas gift from her father some ten months later. See Chapter 3 on her use of the
typewriter and typed notes as a genre of field writing in East London.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
73
In the metaphor she introduced to her fellow Girtonians, the ripe
cheese was no longer so satisfying to taste. She made a decision to
sample cheeses in different states of maturation: the unripe cheese of
the native reserve, the decaying cheese of the native location, and the
medium cheese of settler farms. In early May 1931 she still envisaged
these as equal samplings. In the event, however, it was the unripe cheese
of the Pondo reserve that was most to her taste and later to that of readers
hungry for information about traditional life in Africa.
Her success at working from a trading store in Auckland suggested
that a trading contact in Pondoland would be important. William Beinart
has documented the long-established presence of traders in Pondoland.
There was a trading station at Port St John’s as early as the 1840s. In
1894 there were about a hundred stores in the region and 119 by 1904,
when a new law was passed stipulating that trading stores should be at
least five miles apart from each other.20 When Monica was planning
which of these sites to choose, she drew again on her family connections.
A close family friend, Kenneth Hobart Houghton, known to Monica
as ‘Uncle Kenneth’ (see Figure 1.1), knew Pondoland from his days as
inspector of schools in the Transkei. He had come into contact with a
German storekeeper named Theodore Frederick Dreyer (pronounced
‘Drier’, the family’s anglicised rendition of the name). Dreyer was based
at Ntibane, some 35 kilometres east of Umtata and 15 kilometres inland
from the sea.21
Monica was met at Umtata station by a missionary connection, the
Reverend William Gavin, who accompanied her on a visit to Chief Poto,
the paramount chief of Western Pondoland, who granted her permission
to conduct research in the region. Gavin then drove Monica to his mission
station, Lower Rainy, situated north of Umtata, before driving her to
Ntibane. Here he introduced her to Mrs Dreyer, whom she in turn
introduced to her readers in the Acknowledgements page in Reaction to
Conquest: ‘Particularly am I indebted to Mrs T. F. Dreyer of ’nTibane who
gave me much of her time, and whose popularity with, and knowledge of,
her Pondo neighbours made it easy for me to get to know them.’22 In the
introductory subsection on her ‘Method of Work’, Monica explained that
she worked from ‘a European trader’s store’ and that the ‘trader’s wife’
made cotton skirts for Pondo women. In a later chapter we read of Mrs
Dreyer’s Scottish ancestry. ‘My long stay [of seven months] at one store
was considered curious until my hostess explained that her mother and
mine were of the same clan, both being amaScots. Then I was labelled
20
21
22
William Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan
Press, 1982), 23, 46.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, xvii.
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Figure 2.1. The map of Pondoland that featured inside the cover of the first
edition of Reaction to Conquest (1936). The locations of Monica Hunter’s six
field-sites in Pondoland are underlined: the trading store in Western Pondoland
(Ntibane) where she spent seven months, and the four trading stores (Mbotji,
Ntontela, Nkantsweni and Mzizi) and the mission station (Holy Cross) in Eastern
Pondoland where she spent four months collectively.23
her “sister”, and my visit thought quite natural.’ In another chapter we
are told that her hostess employed a Pondo cook.24
The impression we gain is that her hostess was a white woman of
Scottish ancestry: one trusted and respected by the Pondo community
in Ntibane, as she had gone to the trouble of acquiring knowledge
about their language and culture. Monica describes in some detail how
Mrs Dreyer facilitated her research:
[C]ustomers used to arrive [at the store, Figure P.4, page 281] in the
morning, order a skirt, and wait until it was finished. The women were in
the habit of chatting with my hostess, who was extremely popular. I was
accepted as her sister, and shared the goodwill shown to her. Sitting in a
corner of the store I listened to the gossip, and joined in the conversation.
23
24
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (London: Oxford University Press in Association
with the IAI, 1936), inside front cover.
Ibid., 10, 52, 79.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
75
We talked about marriage, initiation, crops, and children . . . I kept a bag
of tobacco which helped the conversation along.25
This was only half of the story. For ‘Mrs T. F. Dreyer’ was, in actual
fact, Mary Agnes Buchanan Soga, daughter of Dr William Anderson
Soga, the eldest son of the famous Tiyo Soga, the first black man to
be ordained as a minister in South Africa and the translator of The Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa, among other achievements.26 Her mother
was indeed a Scottish woman, Mary Agnes Meikle, as of course was
her grandmother, Janet Burnside. That this was consciously edited out
is evident by comparing this text with the corresponding extract in her
Cambridge doctoral thesis, submitted in January 1934, out of which her
book developed. In this earlier version, the second sentence in an otherwise identical passage reads: ‘The women were in the habit of chatting
with my hostess, who herself had coloured blood, and was extremely
popular with the Pondo.’27 The reasons for this editorial sleight of hand
will be addressed later.
Mary Soga was born on Malan mission station in Willowvale in
September 1886.28 Her father was then some thirty years of age, having
already obtained his doctoral degree in Scotland where he had met and
married her mother. In the course of her childhood, Mary Soga moved
with her parents to Elliotdale, where her father served as a missionary
doctor: one of only five missionaries south of the Zambezi with a proper
medical training.29 Mary may well have been schooled at Lovedale, as
were so many of her family members. The details of her early married
and working life are obscure. In 1923, when Mary was 37, she and her
husband took over the running of the Ntibane trading store, which had
been purchased by Mary’s younger brother, Dr Alexander Robert Bugue
Soga. In May 1931, the very month of Monica’s arrival, the store was
officially transferred into Theodore Dreyer’s name.30
25
26
27
28
29
30
Ibid., 10–11.
On Tiyo Soga, see Leon de Kock, Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African
Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 170–184; Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational
History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 113–
122.
Monica Hunter, ‘The Effect of Contact with Europeans upon a South-Eastern Bantu
Group’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1934), 2.
Cape Archives Depot (CAD), Death Notice of Mary Soga, MOOC 6/9/16812, 1950,
503/50.
Arnett Wilkes, ‘Tiyo Soga’ in W. J. de Kock, ed., Dictionary of South African Biography,
vol. 1 (Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1968), 758. The estimate is David Hunter’s
in his ‘Report on a Visit to 50 Mission Stations in South Africa, Glasgow, Oct. 1895’
(HP, DD1.1, David Hunter’s Writings on Lovedale and Mission Work).
CAD, 1/NQL, vol. 50, file 2/3/2(11). We also learn from this source that the Dreyers
had a child, Ronald Ivan, who later inherited the store.
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Figure 2.2. One of only two surviving photos of Monica Hunter in the field
in Pondoland. Given the vegetation the likely setting is Mbotji and the photographer was therefore probably Michael Geza, her research assistant in Eastern
Pondoland (whose contribution is discussed in detail below).31
This information has considerable significance for understanding
Monica’s relationship with her hostess. Clearly there was a long-standing
family connection, for the Sogas had almost all been schooled at Lovedale
and it is likely that Mary Soga herself attended Lovedale around the time
that David Hunter began working there in the mid-1890s. The Soga–
Hunter connection continued into the 1930s. David Hunter’s personal
papers provide evidence of a warm and mutually respectful personal and
professional relationship with Tiyo Burnside Soga, then a missionary at
Emgwali.32 The two men had worked together as joint treasurers of the
Lovedale Educational Board. There were also other scholarly connections. Monica would have recently read the classic account of Xhosa
history written by Mary’s uncle, John Henderson Soga, and published
by Witwatersrand University Press the year before she came to Ntibane.
The South-Eastern Bantu is one of the few works cited in the hastily compiled bibliography to her doctoral thesis. She had probably also read, in
31
32
HP, EE12 Photographs of African Scenes.
HP, BB6, Correspondence of David Hunter, T. B. Soga/D. Hunter, 11 March 1930,
Emgwali. Tiyo Burnside Soga was the son of Tiyo Soga’s half-brother, Xaxa.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
77
manuscript form, John Henderson Soga’s other major work, The AmaXosa: Life and Customs, which was published by Lovedale Press during
her stay with Mary Soga.33
That the Soga name played a direct role in the choice of Ntibane is evident from Monica’s private recollections many years later. ‘My mother,
who was slightly suspicious of trading stores, said: “Oh well, if she is
going to a Soga, it’s all right. I don’t mind.” So off I went to Pondoland.’
Jessie Hunter’s faith was well placed. In her old age, Monica still fondly
recalled how Mary ‘Drier’ had ‘kept a very motherly eye on me’.34
Monica stayed in one of the rooms in the Dreyers’ house, which still
stands some ten or fifteen metres behind the shop at Ntibane. Mary
ensured that her laundry was done – it was included in the £5 a month
that her father paid for board – and they allowed Monica to use one
of their horses on her expeditions. Mary, Monica later recalled, ‘didn’t
like my going round alone’ and ensured that the Hunter’s daughter was
accompanied on all her expeditions – sometimes by a teenage girl but
often by Mary herself, as the following letter indicates. It was written to
her mother in the last of her seven months at Ntibane and is all the more
precious as one of only two surviving letters written from the field.
Dearest mums,
. . . Yesterday Mrs D. and I set off at 7 a.m. to make a long visit to old
Mr Kehle, a great grandfather, who lives about 4 miles away across rough
country, and who was reputed to be a mine of information. Mrs D. was a
frightful brick and toiled up hill and down dale with me, and we reached
our friend at nine. Then we asked questions solidly till 2 p.m.! It was a
good indaba [meeting], and the Kehle quite came up to his reputation,
his tongue having been loosened by tea and sugar and ’baccy [tobacco].
We sat under a tree in the inkundla [court-yard] and drank amasi [sour
milk], and were very happy. Imagine the shock Mrs D and I got when a
son calmly produced a dagga pipe and began to smoke. The fine for dagga
smoking is enormous, and the police active in apprehending people, so it
was a comment on the confidence with which Mrs D is regarded. We all
solemnly went on, as if it were only tobacco.
I had meant to go on to the umjadu [dance], postponed from Friday,
which was in the same direction, but it was too far for Mrs D . . . so we
ate our sandwiches and toiled home. 15 minutes after we got in a bad
hailstorm broke, and there was a series of storms lasting till suppertime, so
we were lucky. Mrs D. is terrified of storms, so I was particularly glad we
were in. I curled up for a blissful two hours with David Copperfield and was
quite oblivious to the heavy artillery overhead.35
33
34
35
On J. H. Soga’s works, see Jeff B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa
People in the Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), 178–179.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
WC, B5.2, Correspondence between Monica Hunter and Jessie Hunter, Monica
Hunter/Jessie Hunter, 2 Nov. 1931, Ngqeleni.
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What this reveals, apart from Monica’s already lively and fluent writing
style, sound reading habits and immersion in a world of amasi (sour
milk), the inkundla (the courtyard between huts and kraal in which men
sit) and an umjadu (feast), is that (at least some) of her fieldwork was a
thoroughly collaborative effort. Mary Soga did more than locate a wise
old man through her shop-based news network and guide Monica to his
residence. She spent four or five hours solidly questioning him along with
Monica, presumably assisting with interpretation and possibly offering
gentle guidance in matters of cultural etiquette. In her book, Monica
wrote: ‘I still blush to think of the outrageous things I did – sitting on
the wrong side of a hut, walking across the inkundla, stating my business
before the proper greetings had been made and I had been asked why I
had come – when I was first in Pondoland.’36 It is fair to assume that it
was Mary Soga who did most of the work in smoothing things over on
such awkward occasions.
There are a few further sources of information about Mary Soga. The
first are Monica’s fieldnotes, of which piles and piles remain stored and
archived in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection. These notes
certainly confirm that Mary Soga, and to a lesser extent her husband
Theodore, provided Monica with much cultural information. There are
dozens of references to ‘Mrs D.’ or ‘M. D.’ (and occasionally ‘Mr D.’) in
these fieldnotes – perhaps even in excess of a hundred notes contain such
inscriptions. Many of them relate to the position of women in Pondo
society. In reworking her doctoral thesis for publication some three years
later, it was the woman who had first initiated her into a knowledge of
such issues to whom Monica applied for clarification. ‘M. A. B. Dreyer’,
as she signs herself, addresses her response to ‘Miss Hunter’ rather than
‘Monica’ and spends little time on small talk: ‘Always glad to hear of
you. We are all fairly well.’ For the rest, she provides a detailed response
to Monica’s ethnographic queries about lovers and lobola laid out in
point form, as no doubt they had been in Monica’s own letter. The
letter is more formal than one might have anticipated, though there are
many possible reasons for this: the intervening years, the constraints of a
relatively unfamiliar format of communication, a mother–daughter rather
than sisterly relationship, or perhaps even a tinge of reserve in the attitude
of a ‘mixed’-race woman (as her death notice designated her) towards a
white woman, however friendly and open-minded.37
Last but not least, some of the older men at Ntibane today still recall the
Dreyer family who ran their local store. Dumisani Mbube revealed that
36
37
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 545.
Death Notice of Mary Soga, CAD, MOOC 6/9/16812, 1950, 503/50. Interestingly, her
brother’s racial classification was ‘European’ on his death notice the same year (Death
Notice of Alexander Soga, CAD, MOOC 6/9/1682, 1950, 6522/49).
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
79
Mary Dreyer was known to people in the community as ‘Inkosazana’ and
was particularly well liked, as Monica’s ethnography would suggest. He
recalls her encouraging crafts in the area, which would be in keeping with
Monica’s account of her as a dress- and skirt-maker. Among other things,
she taught women to stuff pillows. She is also said to have encouraged the
introduction of soya into local diets. The ability of the store to procure
different foodstuffs no doubt enhanced her reputation as an innovator in
this regard. Mbube also remembers her growing her own vegetables in a
fenced-off area behind the store where her husband planted the gum trees
and kept cattle.38 A passing reference in one of Monica’s early articles
indicates that Mary also grew roses, but that it was her maize crop that
‘was the talk of the district’.39
The kindness and philanthropy of Mrs Dreyer was to some extent
compromised by her association with ‘Doboliyatsha’ – ‘Burning Field’ –
the name by which her husband was known and is still referred to today.40
His nickname apparently relates to his role as a labour recruiter for
the mines; in one of Monica’s early articles we have confirmation that
the store doubled up as a ‘recruiting office’.41 According to William
Beinart, many trading stores in Pondoland performed this function as the
number of migrants from the region had increased to over 30,000 by the
early the 1930s, two-thirds of whom worked on the Rand gold mines.42
Mbube recalled ‘Doboliyatsha’ taking truckloads of recruits to Ngqeleni,
the central village in the district some 25 kilometres west of Ntibane,
where they would have been loaded onto buses bound for Umtata and
then transported to the north.
Monica stayed with the Dreyers much longer than she had initially
intended. The reasons are not difficult to fathom. This was her richest
fieldwork experience. During a single winter in Pondoland she attended –
through Mary Soga’s networks – 73 beer drinks, eight girls’ initiation
dances, three weddings, two feasts for diviners and a number of ritual
killings, mostly within an 8-kilometre radius of the store.43 At the end of
her letter to her mother, she reflected: ‘I do like the work. Even if I don’t
write anything I have learnt an enormous amount of value to myself.’
Fifty years later she could still vividly recall the great excitement of this
first extended period of independent fieldwork.
38
39
40
41
42
43
Interview at Ntibane with Dumisani Mbube, a local chief born in the area in the 1930s,
by Leslie and Andrew Bank, 14 March 2007. Patrick Kunju, secretary to the chief of
the Tribal Authority, acted as our translator. My thanks to Leslie for arranging the
interview.
Hunter, ‘Methods of Study’, 349.
Theodore Dreyer ran the store after his wife’s death in 1950, before it was passed on to
his son.
Hunter, ‘Methods of Study’, 349.
Beinart, Political Economy, 146.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 356.
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I thought nothing of working nine or ten hours a day. I would be out all
day watching, or sitting in the store listening and scribbling, and redoing my notes at night. Immense energy I had then, and I was fascinated
by this process . . . It was a real passion for understanding that pushed
me through . . . I was completely swallowed by the excitement of doing this
research.44
Monica arrived back at her Lovedale home on 8 December 1931. She
spent the following two months getting her notes in order during the
family’s annual summer holiday at Hunterstoun above e-Hala. She was
assisted in this by the purchase of a typewriter in the first week of January,
a Christmas present from her father.45
A ‘Man Who Talks of European Politics & Sitting
Next to Lloyd George’: East Bank, East London,
February–April 1932
The next field-site could scarcely have been more different from Ntibane.
From February to April 1932 Monica worked in East Bank location
in East London, an experience that needs to be set in the context
of the political and ideological activism of the port city in the years
before her arrival. William Beinart and Colin Bundy have analysed the
politics of East Bank and particularly that of the powerful Independent
Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (IICU) during 1929–32 and
my account below follows their arguments closely.46 They show that the
IICU, founded in April 1929 as an offshoot of the ICU (the first African
trade union in South Africa) and based in East London, espoused a
more radical Africanism than its parent organisation. The new attitude
was well captured in September 1929 in this strident denunciation of
Hertzog and white segregationist politics by Clements Kadalie, the
Malawian-born founder of both the ICU (in 1919) and now the IICU:
‘Hertzog hates me and I hate him like hell, the bugger. I am a bad native
and I will remain a bad native.’47
In the months that followed, Kadalie’s mood remained aggressive, and
his organisation’s rhetoric was increasingly expressed in a language of
conflict and violence. Suspicions of and hostility towards whites typically
featured in the speeches of the time. ‘They say it took them 2,000 years
to reach their present state of civilisation which is only what we can
44
45
46
47
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’. Emphasis in original.
HP, AA1; Pocket diaries (David Hunter), Jan. 1932.
William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and
Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan
Press, 1987), 270–320.
Cited ibid., 290.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
81
expect from such blockheads.’48 Beinart and Bundy maintain that the
IICU strike in January 1930 was a far more serious threat to white East
London than historians have hitherto acknowledged. Monica Hunter
herself gave a detailed and sympathetic account of these events over
three pages in Reaction to Conquest, setting it alongside other expressions
of African nationalism including the activity of separatist Churches and
the politics of the African National Congress.49 Beinart and Bundy argue
that the IICU retained its political momentum after the strike, adapting
its politics to address location-specific grievances like beer-brewing and
lodgers’ permits. It was still able to attract 6,000 followers at protest
meetings in March 1931, just a year before Monica Hunter began her
fieldwork in East Bank.50
Monica’s fieldnotes reveal that the attitudes of urban Africans to her
questions were often less accommodating than those of country folk.
One informant challenged her directly: ‘Why do you come and ask these
things? You have never been ruled and ill-treated by foreigners.’51 To
work in such an environment, as she later reflected, was only possible
with the sanction of Clements Kadalie himself, and here too her status
as a ‘daughter of Lovedale’ was indispensable.
I called on him and he said yes, he would certainly support my work. And
he called a meeting on a Sunday. And there was a great crowd there. And
he said they could answer any of my questions . . . [that] to collect budgets
on their family affairs was very much in the interests of the community,
that the poverty should be exposed. And he said that he had had a meal in
my father’s house and he could vouch for me.52
Even so, the prospect of Monica’s working long days in East Bank must
have been a very anxious one for her parents. She stayed in white East
London – an option both legal and practical53 – at a boarding house in
22 Belgrave Street run by a Mrs Grant. She recalls a curious incident
towards the end of her stay.
In the boarding-house in which I had meals, there was the Chief of Police.
This was quite accidental. But he always knew exactly where I had been
and, er, chipped me about this after some time, and talked about the danger
of going around alone. And I told him not to be silly, I never went around
at night. And his reply was, ‘Can I take off the tail on you at night? Will
48
49
50
51
52
53
Cited ibid., 293.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 568–570.
Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 316–317.
WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘East London’.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Childhood’.
As Schumaker notes in relation to urban anthropology in Northern Rhodesia during
the 1950s, there were difficulties in applying functionalist anthropological methods in
segregated urban spaces: full ‘participant observation’ was illegal (Schumaker, ‘Tent
with a View’, 252).
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you promise not to go?’ I said, ‘Of course I won’t go, unless I go with
somebody else.’ But it was quite clear that I had been carefully observed
in East London. This was 1932.54
There is in fact evidence that David Hunter employed a bodyguard to
protect Monica during her daily visits to East Bank. She reported in
one of her articles that her ‘bodyguard’ defended her verbally – from
the prying questions of ‘older men’ who felt that she was too young for
the kind of work she was doing. ‘My bodyguard always retorted with an
oration on my education, and the attitude of the critics changed. “She is
really a B.A.? Well of course that does make a difference.”’55
Her fieldnotes reveal that her bodyguard doubled up as her interpreter. On one fieldnote she even entered ‘Interpreter’ before crossing
it out and replacing it with ‘Bodyguard’. Another records the day she
was introduced to him: ‘Seen beer being made. 5 houses today. Feb.
20. Interpreter [services of] offered.’ Many others record his importance as an informant: ‘Interpreter knows of no case of person deported
from location, under Urban Areas Act’, or ‘Interpreter – “very little or
no polygamy in town. Men cannot afford it.”’ He was also evidently
literate (‘Interpreter borrowing books where he can’). I suspect that
this bodyguard-cum-interpreter was Mr R. H. Godlo, a steward of the
Wesleyan Church and member of the Location Advisory Board (a committee of Africans who made decisions about local politics and government): both because one of her fieldnotes records an address along with
his name (St Paul’s Street) and because her main facilitator and protector in East Bank was the chair of the Location Advisory Board, Walter
Benson Rubusana.56
Monica met with the 74-year-old Rubusana on the day she began her
work in East Bank. ‘First day. Visit man who talks of European politics
and sitting next to Lloyd George.’ This was almost certainly Rubusana
himself recalling having sat next to Lloyd George on one of his diplomatic missions to London. Coupled with Monica’s misspelling his name
as ‘Rubisana’ in other notes and in her book, this observation hints that,
unlike Clements Kadalie and the Soga family, Dr Rubusana had not previously met David Hunter. It also suggests that Monica had not yet read
his famous contribution to African-language literature, Zemk’ inkomo
Magwalandini, a collection of over a hundred proverbs with explanatory
notes that was first published in London in 1906 and went into a second
edition within a few years. Over the next two months, however, she got
54
55
56
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Hunter, ‘Methods of Study’, 341.
Quotations are from WC, uncat., Fieldnotes in Folder Entitled ‘East London’. R. H.
Godlo was later elected to the Native Representative Council.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
83
to know Dr Rubusana well and recalls him as something of a father
figure:
I talked a great deal with old Doctor Rubusana, who was older than my
father, a very much respected man who had been a member of the Provincial Council in the Cape Province. And he was interested in, er, social
problems in the city. He was essentially a city-dweller. His wife, who was
his second wife, came from Tyumie. She was a Kashe. And so I had fairly
close links with them.57
Monica’s passing acknowledgment of the ‘Rubisanas’ in Reaction to Conquest does not do full justice to the influence they had on her fieldwork.
They did very much more than offer her security and a stamp of approval:
‘In East London I secured the support of Dr Rubisana, a leading Bantu
minister, and his wife, and also of the officials of the Independent ICU, a
Bantu trades union, and thanks to their influence I was cordially received
in most houses.’58 The dozens of fieldnotes beginning with ‘Dr R.’ or
‘Mrs R.’ reveal that they frequently acted as informants. Mrs Rubusana
also evidently accompanied Monica on house visits and was a respected figure in the township: ‘Excellent furniture in houses. Deference to
Mrs R – inkosikazi.’ For information about the life of township women,
Mrs Rubusana was Monica’s primary informant. The relationship
between them, despite the substantial age gap, was probably fairly warm.
They shared a Lovedale connection and occasional notes suggest that
some of the information was of a personal kind, as when Mrs Rubusana
spoke of her concerns about whether to be buried in town or back
home.
Dr Rubusana undoubtedly played a fundamental role in shaping Monica’s overall view of African life in the location. From her first published
articles through to her 1936 book, she painted a negative picture of
‘Bantu’ urban life. It is easy to imagine the voice of Rubusana in the
background when reading her extended laments about the decline of
African customs and rituals in the urban context, especially those about
the dissolution of family values and traditional morality – sexual mores
in particular. While something of this might have come from her father –
a great champion of rural craft industries and opponent of migrancy
and rapid African urbanisation – her later recollections confirm that
Rubusana was the main source of information.
He used to tell me that one of the difficulties of bringing up children in
town was that there were so many teenagers coming from the country who
were living without supervision, people who came in to work in town. And
that it was very difficult to bring up, to have a good family life in town,
57
58
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 438.
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because of the influence of those who were coming in without family ties
or supervision.59
David Hunter – again our most reliable guide to Monica’s movements –
records that Monica returned home on 15 April 1932. In May and June
she worked in Rhini, the African location in Grahamstown. Her Grahamstown file is very slender by comparison with that for East London,
most likely because she found no mediators with the status and generous
spirit of the Rubusanas of East Bank.
‘Michael Geza My Clerk’: Four Stores and a Mission
Station, Eastern Pondoland, July–November 1932
Ever industrious, Monica wrote a paper in late June and presented it at
the annual meeting of the South African Association for the Advancement
of Science in Durban on 7 July.60 She began her second major field trip
in Pondoland just three weeks later. On 27 July, David Hunter recorded
in his diary: ‘Took Monica to Komgha, 164 miles.’61 Here she caught a
train north to Umtata, where she would have spent some days meeting
with officials in order to obtain permission to travel through Western
Pondoland, the region to the north of the Umzimvubu River. This is also
probably where she took on the services of a Pondo man named Michael
Geza, who would spend the following four months with her. They were
based at four trading stores (Mbotji, Ntontela, Nkantsweni and Mzizi)
and a mission station (Holy Cross). (See Figure 2.1.)
Michael Geza’s contribution in the field is more fully acknowledged in
Reaction to Conquest than that of either Mary Dreyer or the Rubusanas.
She introduces him to readers as ‘my clerk’ in a brief opening acknowledgment, but later lists his ‘clerical’ activities in detail along with some
background information.
On the second visit I was accompanied by a Pondo clerk, Michael Geza. He
was extremely helpful in writing reports of cases which we heard in chiefs’
courts, taking down songs and folk-tales, reporting witchcraft cases, and
writing accounts of customs in the vernacular. He was educated and a
Christian, but came of a pagan family of doctors, his ancestors having
been doctors to the imiZizi chiefs for nine generations. The office is still in
his family.62
As in the case of Mary Soga, it is instructive to consider how this text
differed from the corresponding extract in her doctoral thesis, for here
too Monica had chosen to omit certain details. ‘On my second visit I was
59
60
61
62
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
Later published as Monica Hunter, ‘Results of Culture Contact in the Pondo and Xosa
Family’, South African Journal of Science, 29 (October 1932), 681–686.
HP, AA1, Diary, 1932.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, xvii, 12.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
85
accompanied by a Pondo man Michael Geza, as bodyguard, and having
him with me learned considerably more of matters concerning men, than I had
the previous year, and spent more time in chiefs’ courts, listening to cases and
talking to councillors. My bodyguard was literate, and I found him extremely
useful in writing reports.’63 In this fuller account, Geza is given a far more
active role in the production of anthropological knowledge in the field.
Monica indicates that he doubled up as a bodyguard, attributes to him
much of her newfound knowledge of men’s matters, and implies that he
facilitated her access to the chiefs’ courts and councillors. There is also
more information of a personal kind.
He therefore knew much of native custom, particularly of matters connected with religion and magic, and was useful as a check on the information
of other people. Having a full time man in my pay I found an advantage,
as he identified with my interests, could repeat to me gossip of the district
which we visited, found suitable people to whom we might go for specialized knowledge, and told me much about his own family and boyhood.
Long days in the saddle were conducive to conversation, and we sometimes travelled far to visit some ancient noted as a specialist on custom and
history.64
Her notes confirm that Michael Geza contributed very significantly to
her researches in the field. There are perhaps two hundred pages written in Xhosa in Geza’s own hand, including lengthy documents headed
iintsomi (traditional tales), ukubusa (gifts), iingoma (songs, usually those
of traditional healers) and so on. Her fieldnotes are filled with his medical knowledge, much of it unused in her published work. As the first
Pondo among the men with whom she had collaborated (Dr Rubusana
and Mr Godlo were Xhosa), Geza significantly shaped her ideas about
the attitudes of Pondo men towards chieftainship and political authority, marriage and magic, tillage and the tokoloshe (in which he firmly
believed despite being schooled).
The notes also provide additional biographical details, for example this
praise song to his grandfather, who was celebrated as a fearsome warrior:
UNomandindi wezibaya zika,
Mkizwana, uhlaba zihlangana,
UNgqambu ngo-mkonto kuvel’amatumbu.
He [who] battered down the cattle kraal of Mkizwana
He who stabbed the first
And he who cut till the intestines came out.65
63
64
65
Monica Hunter, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa’
(Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1934), 6 (emphasis added).
Ibid., 6–7. I am most grateful to Alannah Birch, my colleague at the University of
the Western Cape, for initially identifying these differences during a research trip to
Cambridge in May 2007.
WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘Magic’. My thanks to Isaac Ntabankulu for
the translation.
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In the opening chapter of her book, Hunter shares some of the details she
learnt in the saddle: ‘Geza’s parents died when he was still a child, and he
was brought up in the home of his father’s junior brother’s son. This man’s
wife, Geza said, was extremely good to him, treating him as if he were her
own child.’66 We later read in passing about his former profession, family
and home in Mzizi: ‘Geza, whose own home was immaculate, detested
entering the bug-infested huts in which we had to spend days. He was
as loath as I to accept food in dirty places. It is understandable that a
retired policeman, living in his well-built brick house, with his motor-car
and six sons, all certified teachers, coming home at week-ends on their
motor-bicycles, should hold himself somewhat aloof from poor and dirty
neighbours.’67
Here again Monica was many years younger than her assistant in the
field. Her much later recollections of ‘Geza’ are not as warm as those
in relation to ‘Mary Drier’ and ‘old Dr Rubusana’. Notes in preparation for her 1934 article on her fieldwork methodology suggest that
their relationship was relatively formal despite the long hours of contact: ‘Second trip. E. Pondoland . . . Use of body guard . . . Interested
in job – good manners.’68 There was seemingly a need for a ‘bodyguard’, given that she was viewed with suspicion also in these more
remote country areas. ‘On first arrival in a new district I was always
suspected of being a tax collector, one investigating for the Government who were considering raising taxation, a detective in search of
criminals, a Government agent spying on the chief, or one looking for
lepers.’69
Michael Geza would have played a role in smoothing things over, just
as Mr Godlo had done in East Bank. Like Mary Soga, he offered gentle
guidance and occasional censure in matters of cultural etiquette, as these
notes reveal: ‘M. “Asking a person to tell an intsomi is just like meeting
someone in the road, and asking them to dance”’; ‘It is insulting to old
people to ask them to tell iintsomi. You are making a game of them if you
ask them to tell you these things.’70
That Monica was uncertain quite how to classify Geza’s collaborative
work is evident from her only other surviving letter from the field. It
was typed up in October 1932 at the store of a trader named Smith,
based at Ntontela, and sent to Winifred Hoernlé at the University of
the Witwatersrand, who had evidently taken on the role of informal
supervisor.
66
67
68
69
70
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 21.
Ibid., 377.
WC, A2.15, Monica Wilson, ‘Notes: Anthropology in South Africa’, Recorded for Jim
Fox, Behavioural Sciences Centre, April 1972’.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 433.
WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘Pondo Iintsomi: Linguistic’.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
87
Figure 2.3. This is a recording of one of the many iintsomi (Xhosa traditional
stories) written for Monica by Michael Geza. Headed ‘The story of SiswanaSibomvana’, it tells of a young girl who went to plough the fields with her mother.
She became thirsty and went to drink water from the well of the chief of the
animals, the lion. She drank all the water from the well. When the lion returned
in the afternoon and asked her who it was that had drunk the water she said,
‘Please ask my mother who sent me here’. She was swallowed by the lion. When
her mother went looking for her at the home of the lion she too was swallowed
by him.71
Thank you ever so much for all the questions. They help very greatly. I am
still considering the points raised on chieftainship in your second letter,
and will reply to them later . . . I thought of moving on from here in a
fortnight or three weeks, to Sikelweni in the Flagstaff district, where I shall
be among Nyaza Pondo but in reach of the Imizizi, with whom I should
like to spend a few days, to check up history, and relations with the Pondo.
The ‘accompanyist’ is an Mzizi and can put me in touch with reliable old
men there. 72
Monica returned from Eastern Pondoland in early November and spent
her final two months visiting farms in the Adelaide, Bedford and Albany
districts closer to home. Here again ‘Uncle Kenneth’, now an inspector
for schools in the Ciskei, provided the contacts that facilitated access to
the farms and their communities of African workers.73 For the first time,
71
72
73
WC, uncat., Fieldnote in Folder Entitled ‘Pondo Iintsomi: Linguistic’. Thanks to Isaac
Ntabankulu for this summary of the translated text.
Witwatersrand University Archive, AU8 HOE, Winifred Hoernlé Papers, Box Entitled
‘Bantu’, Folder Entitled ‘Bantu Religion’.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
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language and culture were not a problem – many of the farmworkers were
second or third generation. There was therefore no need for bodyguards,
intermediaries or ‘accompanyists’.
In January 1933, Monica sailed back to Cambridge. She spent a
year writing up her findings under the supervision of Thomas Hodson, while attending Malinowski’s famous seminar at the London School
of Economics. David Hunter’s diary reveals that she sat for her viva on
17 January 1934.74
Acknowledgement
Reaction to Conquest came out in July 1936, published by Oxford University Press in association with the International African Institute. It was
introduced by the former South African prime minister Jan Smuts, who
was fulsome in his praise: ‘probably as detailed and exact an account
of the social system and ideas of a tribe as is to be found anywhere.
It is worthy to be placed by the side of Junod’s Life of a South African
Tribe’.75 Monica sent copies to J. B. M. Hertzog and Jan Hofmeyr, as
well as the minister and secretary of Native Affairs. She also sent a copy
to Mrs Dreyer at Ntibane, though interestingly not to Michael Geza.
Dr Rubusana had died just two months before publication.
The book was truly something of a media event. It was reviewed –
favourably, without exception – in at least a dozen newspapers. The Cape
Times and Daily Dispatch featured these reviews as their leading articles.
Isaac Schapera praised it at length in the Cape Argus the following month.
It featured later in the Johannesburg Star and the Sunday Times as well
as the Natal Witness and the Mercury. The British press was, if anything,
more enthusiastic. Reviews appeared in the Times Literary Supplement,
the Spectator (Audrey Richards at some length) and (with lavish visuals
selected from the book) the Illustrated London News.76 Glowing journal
reviews also came after some months, with many leading South African
intellectuals adding their voices to the chorus of praise: Winifred Hoernlé
most incisively, W. M. Macmillan almost grudgingly.77 Malinowski, the
74
75
76
77
HP, AA1, Diary of 1934.
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, viii. Numerous reviewers criticised the title, pointing out
(as Monica herself very clearly did in the Introduction) that the Pondo were one of
the only African groups who were not militarily conquered. Pondoland was annexed to
the Cape Colony in 1894. Her correspondence with the Institute of African Languages
and Cultures suggests that she had difficulty coming up with a marketable title. At one
point she even suggested ‘Pondo Meet White Men’, a somewhat naı̈ve and old-style title
thoroughly out of keeping with her sophisticated analysis (WC, D11, J. H. Oldham/Mrs
G. B. Wilson, 31 May 1935, London).
For clippings of these reviews, see WC, H1.3, Reaction to Conquest, Reviews.
Agnes Winifred Hoernlé, ‘Review of Reaction to Conquest’, Africa, 10, 1 (1937), 121–
126; William Miller Macmillan, ‘Review’, International Affairs, 16, 2 (March 1937),
314–315.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
89
Figure 2.4. The first of the page-spread features published in the Illustrated London News of 22 August 1936 in ‘appreciation’ of Reaction to Conquest. The photographs were selected from the 28 plates that featured in the book.
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Inside African Anthropology
great guru himself, described it as the best study of culture contact in a
decade in which such works were appearing thick and fast.78 It was the
making of her academic reputation – and justly so. As later generations of
scholars have recognised, it was ‘precocious’, ‘a classic’ with a wealth of
textural detail about Pondo cultural life combined with an astute political
analysis. It was the richness of the fieldwork that gave the study this instant
and international recognition.
Monica’s African assistants played a crucial role in ensuring the
book’s acclaim. Without them, her study would simply have not been
possible. As noted earlier Nancy Jacobs writes of ‘a continuum of
acknowledgement’79 in relation to ornithologists’ assistants in Africa,
ranging from complete anonymity, through brief mentions of important
contributors about whom we know little, to a handful of assistants who
are recognisable as both contributors to scientific knowledge and individual personalities. If we apply this continuum to the African assistants
used by Monica, the ‘Fingo schoolmistress of my own age’ in Auckland
Village is at the bottom end. Her assistance is only mentioned in passing
in an article, although this young woman probably was very important in
developing Monica’s linguistic knowledge in her earliest days in the field.
Yet we do not even know her name.
Dr Walter Benson Rubusana is only briefly mentioned in the book,
although we know much about his life from other sources. There is a
striking gap between this acknowledgment and his actual contribution,
as revealed through later memories and especially in Monica’s fieldnotes.
The tradition of political radicalism, and the particular expressions of
that radicalism through the activism of the IICU in East London in the
years immediately before she came to work in the location, meant that it
was no easy matter for a young white woman to drop in and start asking
questions. Her fieldnotes and the political commentary in her published
study indicate that there was considerable and understandable hostility
towards white people among Africans in the location. Clements Kadalie
vouched for her, but it was ‘old Dr Rubusana’ who was most important
in lending her project a sense of moral authority. Rubusana put her in
contact with her interpreter-cum-bodyguard, probably Mr Godlo. He
and his wife profoundly shaped her overall interpretation of the African
urban experience. As often as not, it is the moral tone of these moderate
Africans that we encounter in the concluding section of her study dealing
with recent trends in African politics.
Next along the continuum is Michael Geza. In her book, Monica
lists his ‘clerical’ contributions – reporting on court and witchcraft cases,
78
79
Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ‘Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Changing African
Cultures’ in Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ed., Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), xxxiv.
Jacobs, ‘Servants to Science’, 3.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
91
transcribing songs and folktales, recording customs in the vernacular. She
also provides far more detail about his personal life than she does about
any of her other African assistants, albeit in passing and interspersed
through the chapters. Yet here too, the acknowledgment does not do
full justice to his contribution, for the ‘M’ of her fieldnotes was very
much more than a recording ‘clerk’. As she more openly revealed in her
doctoral thesis, Michael Geza acted as a bodyguard, negotiated access
to informants in a context of much suspicion, and, most importantly,
‘during long days in the saddle’ provided her with knowledge about
matters of magic, medicine and witchcraft – the topics that absorbed
most of her attention during her fieldwork in Eastern Pondoland. This
arguably allowed her to adjust the project from one on the changing
status of Pondo women to a book documenting Pondo cultural life more
generally. Geza also guided her in matters of etiquette, including polite
ways of collecting traditional stories.
Mary Dreyer was the most fully and warmly acknowledged of Monica’s
African assistants. At the outset, she expresses a special debt to ‘Mrs. T. F.
Dreyer’ for sharing her time, knowledge and networks, and her accounts
of her fieldwork methodology explain in more detail how these contacts
were established through informal networks in the store and its sewing
room. Monica indicates that she came to be viewed as Mrs Dreyer’s sister
by her informants, as we have seen. Yet even this did not do full justice
to the role Mary Dreyer played. Monica’s surviving letter from Ntibane
shows that her ‘hostess’ actually accompanied her on field trips, acting
as a guide and translator on country visits. Her fieldnotes indicate that
she relied extensively on Mary Dreyer for cultural information about the
world of Pondo women, the initial focus of her research.
Most interesting, however, is what her doctoral thesis clearly reveals
to be a self-conscious suppression of the ‘coloured’ identity of Mary
Soga. Herein lies the very key to understanding Monica’s motivation for
downplaying the enormous contribution of her African assistants. The
authority of anthropological writers in the era of Malinowski and the
‘tribal’ monograph was premised on thorough immersion in an exotic
culture, one that presupposed complete linguistic fluency – of the kind
that Malinowski himself had developed with his great flair for languages.
The native interpreter or intermediary so generously acknowledged in
word and image by, say, Henri Junod could no longer be given the same
textual authority. This process is best described by James Clifford in his
essay ‘On Ethnographic Authority’.
By representing the Nuer, the Trobrianders, or the Balinese as whole subjects, sources of a meaningful intention, the ethnographer transforms the
research situation’s ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait. It is important, though, to notice what has dropped out of
sight. The research process is separated from the texts it generates and
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from the fictive world they are made to call up. The actuality of discursive situations and individual interlocutors is filtered out. But informants –
along with fieldnotes – are crucial intermediaries, typically excluded from
authoritative ethnographies. The dialogical, situational aspects of ethnographic interpretation tend to be banished from the final representative
text.80
Read in this light, the editorial sleights of hand between the doctoral
thesis submitted to Cambridge in December 1933, the draft manuscript
version, ‘Pondo Meets White Man’, submitted to the Institute of Languages and Cultures around May 1934, and the smoothed-over final text
of Reaction to Conquest as published in July 1936 together expressed a
more general trend: the filtering out of local knowledge in order to bolster the authority of the individual ethnographer. Monica did not want
(or could not allow) ‘Mrs T. F. Dreyer’ to be seen as too influential in
the shaping of her own knowledge. Admitting that she was Mary Soga,
a woman with a Xhosa father, would have threatened to do this, as perhaps would any fuller admissions of the extent of her contributions on
field trips. Likewise, the silences regarding the ‘long days in the saddle’
and Michael Geza’s expert knowledge of the world of Pondo men, the
Rubusanas’ lessons about location life, or the Xhosa lessons of the schoolmistress, all generated an impression – indeed a fiction – of the author’s
‘ethnographic authority’. In a discipline where cross-cultural negotiation
was always complex and highly contextual, bolstering a sense of ethnographic authority often meant writing out the inevitable messiness
involved in social relations and suppressing any sense of vulnerablility or
confusion or dependence.
It is also important to reflect – following Lyn Schumaker and Nancy
Jacobs – on what motivated these Africans to become research assistants.
In the case of the RLI, where the connections were longer term, Schumaker argues that African assistants were partly motivated by financial
rewards and associated status benefits and the desire to develop new skills
and knowledge, but primarily by racial politics: a desire to contribute to
a profession critical of government and white settler dominance. For the
African assistants who worked with Monica, we unfortunately do not
have any detailed independent research reports to draw upon; their mix
of motives is therefore a matter for conjecture.
Friendship from school days, minor financial reward and perhaps the
desire of an educated young woman to contribute in some way to the
understanding of her own community in Auckland may all have motivated the unnamed Mfengu schoolmistress. Loyalty to Lovedale may have
been significant initially for Mary Soga, but the written traces leave little
80
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 40.
The ‘Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork
93
doubt that the two women built up a warm and close relationship in
which Mary to some extent viewed Monica as a daughter in need of
protection and support. Walter Benson Rubusana, that veteran of Eastern Cape politics, also had some sense of needing to protect a white
woman in her early twenties in a highly politicised African location,
but his interests were no doubt primarily political and scholarly. As an
author himself of a work on Xhosa culture, he would have been strongly
motivated to contribute to Monica’s understanding of African culture
and to shape her interpretations, as he did, of the differences between
African urban and rural life in the early 1930s. He also presumably, like
Clements Kadalie, perceived that her study would contribute to presenting an African point of view and, like the RLI assistants, wanted to
contribute to a critique of segregation and white politics. For Michael
Geza, her most active co-producer of knowledge, the finances were also
a minor part of the story. He was relatively well-to-do, with an immaculate house, successful children and a career behind him. His desire to
instruct and further contribute to Monica’s by then already substantial
knowledge of Pondo culture was presumably his principal motivation.
To what extent, then, is Monica Hunter’s Reaction to Conquest yet
another example of ‘anthropology’s hidden colonialism’? On the one
hand, her knowledge of Pondo culture did draw far more extensively
than she acknowledged on the contributions of a cast of research assistants at her various field-sites; certainly she downplayed the extent of her
dependence on these cultural brokers in the published work, possibly
even to bolster her own ‘ethnographic authority’. Yet this would be a
rather harsh judgement on what has been recognised as a classic ethnographic study from the time of its publication, as we have seen. As in the
other chapters in this volume, the evidence of her relationships with the
Mfengu schoolmistress in Auckland Village, Mary Soga in Western Pondoland, Michael Geza in Eastern Pondoland, and then Walter Benson
and Mrs Rubusana in East London are better conceptualised as creative dialogues, albeit ones that might have been more fully recognised.
Indeed, as the later essays on her relationships with one research assistant in Bunyakyusa in the mid-1930s and then with her African students
at Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town from the mid-1940s to
the mid-1960s so clearly demonstrate, it was her openness and warmth
towards the African interpreters with whom she collaborated that was
one of the underlying reasons for her success as an ethnographer able
to work ‘inside African anthropology’. Unusually, almost uniquely in
southern African ethnographic studies of the period, her main research
assistant in Pondoland was a woman. It is easy to imagine that her later
reflections in a 1972 lecture on the crucial importance of women as
interpreters in the South Africa context (see the Introduction) drew not
just on memories of ‘Koliswe and Thandiwe whom I used to play with
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as a child’, but also of her first intensive fieldwork experience and her
‘intimate’ relationship with Mary Soga at and around Ntibane. As she
went on to remark, ‘Face to face relationships, time to get to know one
another, and a measure of mutual trust are conditions of establishing real
communication.’81
81
Monica Wilson, ‘The Interpreters’, 8–9.
3
City Dreams, Country Magic: Re-Reading
Monica Hunter’s East London Fieldnotes
Leslie J. Bank
The Cambridge idea was that I should observe and see what I saw, and
I could do the reading later . . . And observe events I did! I would be
out all day watching, or sitting in the store listening and scribbling, and
redoing my notes at night. It was very exciting because there was no
record anywhere of a great many of the things I actually known and
participated in . . .
Monica Wilson, interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson,
Hogsback, July 19791
The texts produced in the field are often polyglot. They include large
quantities of the local vernacular plus diverse pidgins, short-hands, and
languages of translation, along with the language or languages of the
ethnographer. The final ‘written-up’ ethnography smooths over the discursive mess – or richness – reflected in the fieldnotes.
James Clifford in Roger Sanjek, ed, Fieldnotes (1990)2
Monica Wilson is best remembered for her rich and detailed rural ethnographies. Her study of the social change and cultural life in Pondoland
became an instant classic in the 1930s, as did her studies on the Nyakyusa
of south-western Tanzania. In the late 1940s she also worked on an interdisciplinary project on land tenure and rural livelihoods in the district
of Keiskammahoek in the Eastern Cape before moving to Cape Town,
where she wrote up the remainder of the Nyakyusa material. By the late
1950s, however, there was a growing interest in the anthropology of urbanisation and social change. Monica responded to this by embarking on a
study of social group formation in Langa, Cape Town. As demonstrated
in Chapter 9, this research was a collaborative effort with her student,
Archie Mafeje, and was published in 1963 under the title Langa: A Study
of Social Groups in an African Township.3 The Langa study was released
with a series of others on Xhosa responses to urbanisation, most notably
1
2
3
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’ in Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Makings of
Anthropology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 59.
Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township
(Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963).
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the ‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy produced by Philip and Iona Mayer and their
colleagues at Rhodes University.4
It is often forgotten that her co-authored Langa study was not Monica’s first attempt at writing urban ethnography.5 As we have seen in the
previous chapter, she had spent several months conducting fieldwork in
the locations of East London and Grahamstown between March and July
of 1932 as part of her Reaction to Conquest study, collecting information
on social change and everyday life in town. The result of this was an
extended ethnographic discussion about a hundred pages long in the
published study. This research is significant for a number of reasons. It
was one of the first examples of urban anthropological research in South
Africa in the twentieth century, alongside Ellen Hellmann’s much-quoted
study on Rooiyard in Johannesburg.6 Second, the bulk of the work was
undertaken in the East London locations, which became the site of
intensive anthropological research in the 1950s under the leadership of
Philip Mayer. The ‘Xhosa in Town’ researchers made surprisingly little
reference to Hunter’s original study of East London, another reason why
it has often been overlooked in the corpus of South African urban anthropology. The work is also important historically because it covers the
period prior to the Second World War and remains one of very few studies
of location life in a South African city at the time of the Great Depression.
The aim of this chapter is to bring Monica’s urban ethnography of the
1930s back into view. I want to reflect on the main argument of this work
and how it was constructed. By her own admission, she followed the
‘Cambridge way’ of researching now and reading later, as she recalled in
the epigraph above. We know she came back to the Eastern Cape from
Cambridge having spent just one year reading anthropology with a particular focus on African anthropology. Her meticulously preserved notes
of books read during this final year of undergraduate study reveals that
her reading did not include any of the classic sociological treaties on the
city by scholars such as Weber or Simmel, or the functionalist works of
the Chicago School, which were leading the way in urban studies on the
4
5
6
The ‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy consists of Desmond Reader, The Black Man’s Portion:
History, Demography and Living Conditions of East London (Cape Town: Oxford University
Press for the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, 1961);
Philip Mayer with Iona Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of
Urbanisation in a South African City (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1961) and
Berthold A. Pauw, The Second Generation: A Study of the Family among Urbanised Bantu
in East London (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963).
For another recent acknowledgment of the importance of her urban research in East
London and Grahamstown in the early 1930s, see James G. Ellison, ‘Monica Hunter
Wilson: Anthropology and Social Justice’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (Berlin:
LIT Verlag for the International African Institute, 2008 (1936)), 33–34.
See Ellen Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slumyard, RhodesLivingstone Institute Papers, 13 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1948).
City Dreams, Country Magic
97
other side of the Atlantic in the 1920s. Her approach was one of contrasting urban life to the rural customs she had documented in Pondoland.
It is interesting that she did not specifically seek out Pondo migrants
and families in East London’s locations, but chose to focus on Xhosaspeaking people in town more generally. Pondo migrants lived mainly in
the small West Bank location and most of them worked in the harbour
and fishing industries. They formed a tight-knit community that lived
and socialised in relative isolation from other Xhosa speakers. As an
ethnic group in East London, the Pondo had much in common with
the Bhaca, who were concentrated in the Cambridge location and were
employed mainly in the municipal sewerage department. Both Bhaca and
Pondo migrants tended, in the Mayers’ terminology, to ‘encapsulate’
themselves in home-mate groups. Unlike the Xhosa-speaking men in
town, men from these tribal groups did not undertake circumcision with
male initiation. Xhosa women and men would taunt them, referring to
them as ‘boys’ – amakhwenkwe – who had not reached proper manhood.
Such accusations sometimes led to violence. In fact, in 1956, twenty
years after Monica visited East London, local residents remember that
intense action broke out in West Bank, when Xhosa ncibis (traditional
surgeons) took their knives to Pondo ‘boys’ to enforce Xhosa manhood
on them. Their intrusion provoked a heavy response that took over six
months for the police to bring under control.7
Monica’s fieldnotes suggest that she did not visit the Pondoland ‘homeboys’ in West Bank. Her fieldwork was confined to the larger East Bank
location, which was dominated by Xhosa speakers from Kentani, Queenstown, Comfimvaba, Butterworth and surrounding areas, and other parts
of the former Ciskei reserve. Unlike most urban anthropologists of the
1950s, therefore, she did not engage in urban anthropology by following ‘her group’ into town. As noted in Chapter 2, she entered the city
not via the social contacts she had made with migrants in Pondoland
in 1931 but through a different network altogether, her father David
Hunter’s social contacts with middle-class Africans in Alice and connections to Churches and African ministers in the East London locations. The renowned Methodist minister and African National Congress
(ANC) stalwart Walter Benson Rubusana was a friend and associate of
David Hunter, whom he visited from time to time in Alice. They were
mutually connected to other middle-class Christian families in East Bank
and Alice. When Monica said she wanted to explore social change in an
urban context, it was her father who made the initial connections in East
7
Lawrence Tutu interviewed by Leslie J. Bank, East London, 28 November 2010. See
Leslie J. Bank, Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African
City (London: Pluto, 2011), 145–165 for a discussion of similar conflicts involving Bhaca
migrants in East London.
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London. We have seen that he even employed ‘a bodyguard’ to watch over
her during her fieldwork. I argue that these connections – the Alice–East
London Church network – had a significant bearing on the perspective
that Monica developed in the section of her monograph on urban social
change. It was arguably a very different view to the one she would have
developed had she worked among the Pondo migrants in West Bank. This
is one of the reasons why Monica’s findings in East London contrasted
so markedly with those generated in the ethnography of Philip and Iona
Mayer, who studied migrant networks and social life in the city twenty
years later.8
Monica’s reliance on her father’s networks was, I believe, a product of
the difficulties of accessing the city through male, migrant networks. In
Pondoland reserve, as we have seen in Chapter 2, her access to male perspectives and orientations came largely through her participant observation as she listened and interviewed at the store and at beer drinks, rituals
and other events where she had contact with men in public settings. Her
more ‘intimate’ work, especially during her first period of fieldwork at
Ntibane, was with women. This denied her access to the kinds of networks that would have led her to West Bank or other migrant destinations.
It is also significant that in East Bank she chose Rubusana’s wife as her
main fieldwork assistant, replicating the model she had developed in
Pondoland with Mary Dreyer (née Soga).
Her entry was further complicated by urban politics in the locations,
which revolved around worker demands for higher wages and the activities of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union
(IICU), the largest workers’ union in Africa at this time, led by Clements
Kadalie. The power of the IICU in the city forced the topics of wages,
poverty and subsistence onto Monica’s research agenda. This greatly
influenced how extensively work and household budgets emerged as key
themes in her urban fieldwork. The ethnography she produced bore the
imprint of these points of connection and was shaped, I maintain, by
larger questions of social and cultural change framed more by her liberal,
mission upbringing and her experience of political debates in the Cambridge Labour Study Circle (see Chapter 1) than by her recent year of
fieldwork in Pondoland.
Thus her work reflected her points of access and more distant past
experience – but I also think her urban ethnographic text was influenced
by the way she made fieldnotes and converted these into ‘thick descriptions’ of urban life.9 In a seminal essay James Clifford distinguishes
between three kinds of writing in the field: inscription, the cryptic notes
8
9
See Philip Mayer with Iona Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen, 94–95, 124–134.
The term ‘thick description’ was coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. See
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
City Dreams, Country Magic
99
made by the fieldworker in moments of direct observation and social
discourse; transcription, the recording of stories and indigenous texts
outside of direct participant observation; and description, the writing
up of fieldnotes away from sites of interaction, whether in longhand or
on a typewriter.10 Although these processes overlap, Clifford feels it is
useful to distinguish between them in trying to understand ways of cultural translation and ethnographic writing. Monica used all three modes
in East London and the process had a significant effect on the kind of
ethnographic text she produced from her fieldwork.11 In the absence of
a clear theoretical model, she was strongly influenced by her methods
of recording, which rendered certain kinds of information more visible
than others. As I see it, her master narrative on urban social change was
constructed from the compression of household interviews into typed
transcriptions and from the many inscriptions she typed up in the field.
Exploring her methods of field writing provides critical insight into how
her East London work was translated into thick description. By approaching her ethnography in this way, I have also been able to identify certain
silences in her published ethnography, dimensions of the field experience
that are rich in the notes yet were never converted into thick description
in the published text.
This chapter first considers the social and political situation in the East
London locations in the early 1930s. It then notes how Monica entered
the field and went on to conduct her research there. This sets the scene for
my assessment of her arguments and the way they were built ‘upwards’
from fieldnotes rather than ‘downwards’ from theory. Most of what she
wrote in the field took the form of inscription, cryptic notes recorded
on loose sheets during her extensive interviews with householders. Her
fieldwork in East London was much more structured than it had been
in Pondoland, where she had found many more opportunities for ‘deep
hanging out’, initially around the trading store and later at rituals, listening to gossip and everyday conversion. This was not easy in East London
given the political circumstances, so she had to rely much more heavily
on the accounts of key informants. These interviews were the ones she
transcribed most fastidiously and that had the most direct impact on the
perspective she developed. I start with her typed notes and fuller handwritten transcriptions before moving on to her more cryptic household
interview notes with their combination of inscription and transcription. It
is in these notes that I find some interesting insights that are significantly
10
11
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 51–52.
Monica’s East London fieldnotes are kept in a bulky single folder and labelled as such
on the cover. When I first consulted them in 2007 this folder was one among many
still uncatalogued materials in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection (WC) in the
Manuscript and Archives Department at the University of Cape Town Libraries. For a
discussion of this archive and its making, see the Introduction to this volume.
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underrepresented in her final ethnographic text, and which provide useful ways of re-engaging with social life in East London’s locations of the
1930s.
‘A Daughter of Lovedale’ in East Bank,
February–April 1932
The African locations of burgeoning East London were in turmoil in the
early 1930s. Two native locations had been established, one on either
side of the Buffalo River. The larger of these was East Bank, where
Monica did most of her fieldwork. In the early decades of the twentieth
century East London had risen to prominence as a trading centre where
economic activity centred on the harbour, railway, merchant houses,
small processing works and craft shops. The town was a centre of African
trade and a major port for exporting wool produced in the Eastern Cape
to Britain and elsewhere. By the 1920s, however, its wool-exporting role
was under challenge and the city was beginning to experience the effects
of economic decline and depression.12
Population growth in the locations had increased steadily during the
first two decades of the century, but exploded during the 1920s as rural
impoverishment in the Ciskei and southern Transkei intensified in the
middle years of that decade. Between 1919 and 1928, the African population of East London grew by over 40 per cent, and between 1925
and 1930 it grew by nearly 8,500 people, an increase of over 50 per cent
in five years. In 1929 alone it was reported that 1,100 immigrants had
arrived from rural areas. Bundy and Beinart explain:
Broadly by the 1920s the urban population comprised three overlapping
categories: those who lived permanently in the town and knew no other
milieu than the city locations; those who regarded themselves as rural
dwellers and were in the city on a strictly migrant basis; and a third or
marginal category whose decreasing access to rural livelihoods of any sort
was impelling them firmly, if reluctantly, into the status of permanent
urban proletarians. These categories lack precision, but as roughly hewn
sociological divisions they were recognised at the time by white and black
observers . . . In 1935 about 30 per cent were urbanised, another 30 per
cent semi-urbanised and 40 per cent were ‘rural’.13
The importance of population growth and the pressure it placed on the
social and economic fabric of the location was noted by many of Monica’s
informants. In one typed note she reported that her ‘interpreter and [a]
Thembu man of standing’
12
13
Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 273.
Ibid., 274.
City Dreams, Country Magic
101
think[s] that over-population is one of the most serious questions. They say
there are far too many people. They think that a war is the only solution to
unemployment. All unemployed would go out to fight and be killed. Rich
men would have to put their hands in their pockets. When I argued that
war would make economic conditions worse, they said: ‘that is because
you have never known hardship’.14
The extract illustrates the economic pressures in the locations, and also
the growing militancy at this time. The political situation in the location
was tense and in a state of flux. One reason was the diminishing sway of
the Location Advisory Board, which had been established to represent the
interests of the African residents but was rapidly losing influence. There
were a couple of hundred property owners in the locations registered
on the Cape voters’ roll, including the ANC stalwarts Walter Benson
Rubusana, R. H. Godlo and J. J. Vimbe, who sat on the Advisory Board.
By the late 1920s residents were increasingly dissatisfied with the representation they were receiving from these elites and had begun turning
to other organisations to express their grievances, such as labour unions
and the local Vigilance Association, which had been set up to represent the interests of leaseholders and lodgers. The latter constituted a
large majority in the location, where access to new accommodation was
restricted and existing home-owners were encouraged to rent out rooms
in their yards. Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions and the absence
of basic services angered local residents, who felt that more land should
be made available for housing in the area. They also felt that building
new municipal houses for elites did not address the underlying need for
accommodation.15
The locations were also rife with dissatisfaction at local wages and
working conditions at the port and on the railways. Average wages for
men in the 1920s were around £5 a month. These were deemed hopelessly inadequate to cover rising living expenses. As discussed in an earlier
chapter, workers were also becoming impatient with the old leadership in
local unions, especially the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union
(ICU), which was dominated by many of the same figures as the Location Advisory Board. A split in the ICU in 1929 led to the formation
of the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union with its
headquarters in East London.16 The return of the unionist Clements
Kadalie from Cape Town in the mid-1920s also gave the new union
momentum. Kadalie and the IICU held meetings in the location every
Sunday and these were well attended. According to Beinart and Bundy,
14
15
16
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
Bank, Home Spaces, 145–146.
See Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa (Johannesburg:
Ravan Press, 1987).
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Inside African Anthropology
a clash between Kadalie and Ballinger, a white lawyer from England
working for the ICU, pushed the new labour union in a more Africanist direction and created new connections between African workers
and independent Churches.17 The new IICU broadened its leadership
base well beyond the trusted old elites and, as a result, drew increasing
attention from the police.
In a context of deteriorating relations among the government, the
union and employers, Kadalie and the IICU called a strike in January
1930 after an ultimatum to the South African Railways and Harbours
for higher wages and better working conditions had not been heeded.
Between 2,000 and 4,000 workers immediately went out on strike and
started attending daily meetings and rallies. By 20 January Kadalie and
the other leaders had been arrested. Monica recorded this note about the
history of the strike.
Strike called everyone out, for more wages. Some continued to work, but
very many came out. Picketing was unsuccessful because of the European
police. There were some rations at first in mealie meal and samp. Kadalie
imprisoned and after two weeks people started to trickle back to work.
Some work for three months. Wages decreased rather than increased . . . It
was called ‘Kadalie’s Strike’!18
Although the strike was quickly broken by the state and employers, and
workers started filtering back to work by the end of January, the power
of the IICU was now stronger than ever in East and West Bank. By 1932
the IICU had begun to address a range of other issues beyond the shop
floor, including the right of women to brew beer without harassment.
The IICU had cleverly broadened its support base, taking on location
grievances and appealing directly to women and independent Churches
for support. Its influence had also increased in rural areas around the city.
Monica’s entry into the East London location scene in 1932 thus
occurred in a context of considerable political activism amid social
upheaval. There was growing anti-white feeling and also a deepening
disillusionment with the cooperative strategies of the local elite, including long-standing ANC members like Walter Rubusana, who was now
regarded by many as an ‘old school’ collaborator. East Bank in the early
1930s had some similarities with the field-site Philip Mayer and his colleagues would describe when they worked there in the mid-1950s (Figure
3.1 shows us how it looked seven years after Monica worked there). A
couple of years before the Mayers arrived in East London, the location
had been torn apart by the rebellion of 1952 which saw dozens of African
killed on the streets by police. The rise of the IICU in the early 1930s was
17
18
See Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles.
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
City Dreams, Country Magic
103
Figure 3.1. East Bank at the outbreak of the Second World War.19
not unlike the late emergence of the radical ANC Youth League in the
late 1940s that galvanised the East London location into political action
against the state. 20
One of the differences between Monica and the Mayers was that she
had strong local political connections among the African elite through her
father, as we have seen, including the link with Walter Rubusana (Figure
3.2). But, as noted, Rubusana was not the figure he had been during
the 1910s and early 1920s. By 1932 he was already in his seventies and
his political influence, as well as that of fellow elites in the location, was
on the wane. Rubusana, his wife and other mission-educated Africans
could not therefore secure Monica the kind of access to East Bank social
networks that Mary Dreyer had been able to provide in Ntibane.21
Clements Kadalie and the IICU were the location gatekeepers and it
appears that it was only after Kadalie himself intervened and introduced
Monica at a rally that a broader engagement with the residents was
possible. In later years she recalled the decisive role Kadalie played.
When I began working in East London township, my work really depended
on Kadalie’s blessing since he had become far more influential than some
people supposed . . . he called a meeting on a Sunday. And there was a great
crowd there. And he said they could answer any of my questions . . . 22
19
20
21
22
East London Museum Collection, East London.
Anne Mager, Gender and Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the
Ciskei, 1945–59 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 148.
See Chapter 2.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
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Inside African Anthropology
Figure 3.2. Walter Benson Rubusana (1862–1936) around the time he worked
with Monica Hunter in East Bank.23
Even so, her close association with the mission-educated elite remained
a primary axis in her work and she would find them to be her most
reliable and influential informants. It was with this group that Monica
felt most comfortable and it was they who opened up most easily to her
questions about the trials and tribulations of location life. The fact that
Mrs Rubusana often accompanied her on her field trips ensured that
she was seen and understood to be a ‘daughter of Lovedale’. Her two
primary advantages as a fieldworker in East London were that she was
fluent in Xhosa and already had an excellent understanding of Xhosa
and Pondo cultural practices and, second, that she had a secure social
and protective base among the local elite on whom she could rely for
23
W. B. Rubusana Collection, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
City Dreams, Country Magic
105
support and information. Against this backdrop I now turn to consider
her fieldwork strategies in some detail, as seen from her fieldnotes.
Typing Up Fieldnotes and Constructing a Master
Narrative
We know from Monica’s letters that she went home to the Hogsback
for Christmas at the end of 1931 when her father gave her a Corona
typewriter and insisted that she learn to use it properly.24 She had not
had one in Ntibane and all her notes there were handwritten. Adding a
typewriter to her armoury as a fieldworker was a significant development
because it allowed her to commit certain kinds of notes to typing and
thus prioritise them over others. As James Clifford explains, the ‘turn to
the typewriter’ may be seen as marking off a particular moment in the
process of recording and description.
Most writing is a sedentary activity. Unlike storytelling, it cannot be done
while walking along a path. The turn to the typewriter involves a physical
change of state, a break from the multi-sensory, multi-focal perceptions
and encounters of participant observation . . . In crucial respects, this sort
of writing is more than inscription, more than the recording of a perception
or datum of evidence. A systematic re-recording goes on. Fieldnotes are
written in a sense that will make sense elsewhere later on.25
Here Clifford draws a clear distinction between notes that are typed
and those that are not. He suggests that the former are often written with an external audience in mind. They become ‘a distanced,
quasi-methodological corpus, something to be accumulated, jealously
preserved, duplicated, sent to an academic advisor, cross-referenced,
selectively forgotten or manipulated later on’. ‘This (type) writing’, he
continues, ‘is far from a simple matter of recording: the facts are selected,
focused, initially interpreted and cleaned up.’26
So how did Monica set about doing her fieldwork in East London, and
what notes and facts did she choose to record in type, and what did she
leave as handwritten notes? Unlike her Ntibane work, where she spent
a great deal of time listening to gossip and everyday chatter at the village store and rituals, she entered East London with a focused approach.
It seems that her first object was to gather general information on the
demographic, social and economic conditions in the location. To this
24
25
26
The latter we can glean from a letter she wrote to him from London between bouts of
fieldwork in Bunyakyusa. ‘I am so grateful to you for giving me a typewriter and insisting
that I learn to use it properly!’ WC, B5.1 Monica Wilson/David Hunter, London, 30
April 1936. We know that it was a Corona from WC, A2.22 Customs forms: – requesting
permission to export Corona typewriter, 6 Dec. 1932.
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 62.
Ibid., 64.
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end, she set up appointments with people from the local municipality,
spoke to the location medical officers and interviewed knowledgeable
African leaders, including of course the Rubusanas. She spoke to lawyers
and consulted court records as well. Her aim was to quantify certain
key indicators of social and economic life in the location. For example,
she wanted to be able to establish how many members of a given household were permanently in town and how many were temporarily there.
Her inquiries led her to conclude that some 43 per cent of household
residents were permanent and 57 per cent were temporarily in town
(migrants).27
She then went to bus companies and the train station to find out how
many people left East London at the weekend and month-end, and how
many tickets were sold. She found out, for example, that in three successive weeks in February 1932, 234, 245 and 369 people had travelled
to Middledrift on return tickets. She also learned that average wages in
the city were in the region of £5 per month, and that men generally
earned considerably more than women, whose formal employment was
almost exclusively confined to domestic service. Inquiries with local medical personnel revealed that infant mortality rates were shockingly high –
averaging around 333 per 1,000 and peaking at over 500 per 1,000 in
1931.28
She then constructed a complex social map of religious groups and
affiliations, where she listed all the denominations and tried to determine
their membership and the range of social and religious activities in which
they engaged. Other inventories included a list of social and sports clubs,
as well as notes on the booking of various community halls:
Hire of St Phillips Hall. 1931
February 13 Florence Mdayi Concert
March 28 Mali Mango Teachers Concert
April 11 Coloured Concert
May 15 Scots Msuto concert and dance etc.
These facts were neatly typed out and accumulated as information that
would be included in her overall description of town life. Interestingly,
she made little effort to develop similar inventories of labour or political organisations, with their memberships and social activities, or to
gather information about the burning political issues. She did, however,
write about the IICU strike of 1932 and the rise of African nationalist
organisations in the concluding section on ‘Tendencies’ in her published
study.
27
28
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 434.
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
City Dreams, Country Magic
107
In between rushing around to source demographic, economic and
social information about the locations and the city, she worked on a survey that recorded basic information on the social, economic and cultural
orientation of urban households. She wanted to find out the income
levels of each household, their health profiles, the changing position of
women and children, their adherence to customary practices, their connections to the countryside and their involvement in social and religious
life. Many versions of her basic questionnaire structure appear in her
notes with varying degrees of detail in the types of questions to be asked.
In the end, she reported that she had visited 213 households in East
London and Grahamstown. In a section of her notes called ‘Visits with
Mrs R’ (Mrs Rubusana in East London), she lists a set of topics:
Group
Relationships
Relations in the location
Temporary or permanent
Period spent in the location
Intend to go home?
Land in the reserves?
Prefer town or country?
No. in working group
Wages
How far wages pooled?
Unemployed
Labour histories
Money sent out of the location
Kazi (bridewealth)
Kind
Who provided?
Cooked for mother in law
Marriage age
No. of births per mother
No. survived
Observance of custom29
This typed list reflected the basic lines of questioning she had in mind for
the household survey. In her typed notes, converted from handwritten
ones taken during the interviews, she tried to compress the answers to
these questions into a few key words in vertical columns under each
heading. When this summary technique was not working, she resorted
to compressing the survey findings even further into the following topics:
group, temporary or permanent, labour, custom, births, with a few other
categories like education and general creeping in now and again. These
concise case histories were then typed out with about ten lines given to
29
Ibid.
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Inside African Anthropology
each. She seems to have typed up some fifty such case studies. Perhaps
she felt the trends were already coming through clearly and there was no
need to do the other cases in the same way. Maybe she typed them all out
and the rest have been lost somewhere. A typical entry looks like this:
Group: man, wife and three children; labour, hus. [husband] piece work,
wife does not know wage, she does not work – beer. Custom – married
amaxoseni, 8 kazi, all cattle, husband dead, she came straight to town with
him. Wedding rings. Children: 3, none died.
The fact that she compressed her case studies in this way suggests a
selection, a choice of clear categories and a frame for conversion of notes
into a narrative text. Besides the compressed case studies, she used her
typewriter to record important pieces of information and interviews with
key informants. These are what Clifford calls ‘inscriptions’. It seems that
when she felt she had come across an authoritative voice on a particular topic – social life, religious beliefs, the 1930 workers’ strike, social
groups or community divisions – she recorded these on her typewriter.
Her inscriptions also record observations made in the field. These small
bits of text, disparate facts and opinions picked up on the flow of social
discourse. They appear to have been written up usually in one or two
short paragraphs, which she later tore into strips of one or two sentences,
mini ‘sound bites’ on particular topics. The utterances and observations were then pinned together, sometimes with handwritten notes that
were also torn into strips and then pinned together. The individuals who
provided the information, their social position, whether they were Qaba
(Red) or School,30 workers or teachers, men or women, were lost in this
process of stripping and re-categorisation for analysis.
Eagerness to get Dispatch [the local newspaper]. Try to pinch each other’s
copies. Number of elderly men who sit at home and do nothing but talk
politics. Work still a necessary evil – a means to an end – money.
Dances most Saturday and Friday evenings. Not by invitation. When hear
music come along. No dance clubs but social services league and sports
clubs give the dances. Each one gives more than one a year. Some churches
oppose this. Mrs Rubusana says nothing.
Notice the presence of Mrs Rubusana in the last quote. It is as if Monica
is waiting for her comment. In the typed excerpts there is no consistent attempt to group together the opinions of certain sections of the
population, or to compare or contrast views and opinions. One of the
30
In Monica’s shorthand classification, Red or qaba meant people who resisted modernity,
were pagans and had little or no schooling. They were traditionalist in town. School, on
the other hand, was used to refer to people who embraced modern ways and attended
church and school. For further discussion of this distinction see Philip Mayer with Iona
Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen and Leslie J. Bank, Home Spaces, Street Styles.
City Dreams, Country Magic
109
Figure 3.3. A selection from the hundreds of fieldnotes that Monica recorded in
East London, some typed, some handwritten, all preserved on strips of paper.
Note the references here to ‘Interpreter’, ‘Dr R.’, ‘R.’ in the typed notes, and to
‘Mrs R.’ in the handwritten note.31
consequences of this is that the views of socially dominant sections of the
location community are more strongly represented in her ‘description’
and final analysis. This is not, it would seem, because Monica did not
have an appreciation for differences of class, social upbringing and the
like, but rather that she did not systematically attempt to document these
differences in her analysis.
The focus in her typed notes on the activities of social groups is
also significant. On this topic, she felt that religious affiliation and
membership was the key determinant of location social life. She noted
that one of the main developments in the 1930s was the growth of
independent Churches and sects that were breaking away from the
mainstream Churches and developing their own congregations and
31
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
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Inside African Anthropology
micro-social worlds around them. Most Churches offered much more
than weekly services. There were prayer groups, weekly meetings for
boys and girls, teas and other social activities. Sports clubs offered access
to a social world. She notes that the social life of the club, which involved
an endless string of matches, dances, fêtes and other social gatherings,
kept people together. In her book she reported as follows:
Christians form a group marked off from pagans, but within the Christian community there are many sectarian divisions, and the effective social
group is the congregation. In East London there are 57 sects whose adherents total approximately 2,080. A common faith and common activities
draw the members of a congregation together. In all the larger congregations there are Sunday services, associations of women, girls and young
men, which meet weekly for prayer and bible study. Practically all the
schools are associated with a church . . . Friendships tend to be made within
these groups.32
In her notes we hear that the ‘Qaba [Reds] have their spaces’, but there
is little attempt to map these out in the same detail as she did with the
more urbanised sections of the community. This is perhaps because she
had already gathered so much information on rural life and relationships
that she was more interested in capturing the dynamics of social change,
the new kinds of groups and associations in town, rather than showing
how those which already existed in the countryside were replicated in
the city. This may also be because she spent so much more time at
women’s tea parties and very little time at male-centred beer drinks. She
often reported on the unbearable smells in migrant ‘hovels’ and backyard
shacks, but in any case, as a woman she would have found it difficult to
access the sexist world of migrant life in the town. It is also unlikely that
‘Mrs R’ would have been keen to spend too much time with illiterate,
hardened male migrants. In fact, it is only with the publication of the
Mayers’ Townsmen or Tribesmen that this aspect of urban life became fully
visible. The kinds of groups and associations he refers to were certainly
there in the 1930s, but they were not the spaces that Monica was keen
or able to visit.
In any event, for Monica the city was not about the retention or reinvention of tradition. It was about social change. She was struck by how
very different the city was to the countryside and was alarmed at how
quickly the ‘superficialities’ of urban culture were imbibed by the urban
poor. She was astonished at the power of money and repeatedly remarked
on how everything in town rested on money. The insatiable desire for
cash seemed to corrupt even the most resilient rural migrants. There are
many typed inscriptions on this topic which are translated into text in
her monograph.
32
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 462.
City Dreams, Country Magic
111
Money gives power to obtain so many of the desired things of European
civilisation – better clothing, housing, furnishing, food, education, gramophones, motor-cars, books, power to travel – all the paraphernalia of western civilisation is coveted. Again and again old men spoke to me of how
intense was the desire for money in the younger generation.33
In relation to money she noted that there was an appetite for gambling
and that betting games were common on the streets. Many men spent
their Saturdays at the tote betting on the horses, while the Chinese betting
game fah-fee was also popular.
Big crowds turning out to watch football matches. Interpreter lost 1 pound
at the Easter horse racing . . . Keep their dreams [of money] because they
play fah fee (3 Chinese run fah fee), attend horse racing, much betting on
cards, many tickets sold for the sweep stakes.34
In the city there seemed to be the desire and hope that money could
come quickly. She noted that ‘in town it is smart to be as europeanised as
possible. In their dress men and girls follow European fashions – “Oxford
bags”, berets, sandal shoes. Conversation is interlarded with European
slang . . . Houses, furniture, and food are as European as earnings permit.’ The ‘raw tribesmen’ found themselves in a marginal position.
The values in town are European, not tribal. Status depends largely on
wealth and education and these entail Europeanisation . . . Knowledge of
tribal law, skills in talking, renown as a warrior, and even the blood of
a chief’s family, count for comparatively little in town. These conditions
make for the speedy transference of at least the superficialities of culture.35
Even in terms of social life and entertainment, Monica argued, tribal
influences were on the wane. She observed that few tribal rituals were
held in town.
There is little Native dancing . . . Young people gather in private houses,
particularly on Friday and Saturday evenings, for parties, but here
European fox trots [sic] were more often performed than the old Bantu
dances. And the music is European or American ragtime. About the street
one more often hears ragtime hummed than an old Bantu song.36
The cosmopolitan cultural influences she alluded to in Reaction to
Conquest seem to have deepened significantly during the 1940s and
1950s. The Second World War was a political and cultural watershed, a
period when location residents became more aware of their rights and
were profoundly affected by popular transnational cultural forms. One of
33
34
35
36
Ibid., 455.
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 437.
Ibid., 455.
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the great virtues of Monica’s work in the 1930s, compared with that of
the Mayers in the 1950s, was that she was acutely aware of the powerful
impact of modernity and cosmopolitan cultural influences on African
life in the city. The focus of her analysis and ethnography was not on
the reconstruction of tradition in the city, but rather on the breakneck
speed with which social life was changing, and the new social and cultural
forms that were beginning to emerge. Yet she was not necessarily alert
to this virtue. In common with, or perhaps partially influenced by, her
mission-educated peers in the location, she found most of these changes
alarming, as we will see below.
Inscribing Social Categories from Fieldnotes
For Clifford, fieldnotes are prepared and served up in various ways.
Fieldnotes, less focused and ‘cooked’ than published ethnographies, reflect
more diverse, often contested, contexts of authority . . . Fieldnotes contain
examples of three kinds of writing: inscription (notes not raw, but slightly
cooked or chopped before cooking), description (notes sautéed, ready for
the addition of theoretical sauces) and transcription (reheated leftovers?).
But the cooking metaphor is inexact because there are no ‘raw’ texts.37
Extending this culinary metaphor, he suggests that description, especially
thick description, is usually covered with a sauce or a glaze, the nappe
(in French cuisine), which smoothes over and hides ‘the productive and
transformative process of cooking’.38 So, on the one hand, Clifford is
telling us that there are really no ‘raw texts’ in fieldnotes because all
writing is shaped to some extent by selection and pre-coding, while on
the other, he asserts that delving into fieldnotes allows one to get behind
the ethnography to view its semi-cooked ingredients.
With the above in mind, it is useful to consider how Monica constructed her social categories in both her ethnography and her fieldnotes. One
of the reasons why this is interesting is that, when Philip Mayer and his
teams conducted extensive fieldwork in East Bank twenty years later,
they were struck by the overwhelming salience of a single social divide,
that between Red (abantu ababomvu) and School (abantu basesikolweni)
people. Monica did not see this divide as clearly. Was it not there in
the early 1930s? Or was it because, as she asserted later, the Mayers had
exaggerated the significance of the Red/School divide in the East London
locations?
It seems to me that, unlike the ‘Xhosa in Town’ Trilogy writers, Monica
was not looking for a fractured community but was planning to describe
37
38
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 58.
Ibid., 59.
City Dreams, Country Magic
113
and account for the different aspects and dimensions of urban social life
in an integrated fashion. She was obviously acutely aware of the division
between what she called ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ urbanites. For the
former she anticipated close social connections with the countryside and
frequent return visits to family and kin. Her interest in bus and railway timetables and the flows of migrants and commuters between town
and country bear witness to this interest. But, while recognising this distinction, Monica also noted that many of the temporary urbanites were
family members of the more permanent ones and that the contours of
these categories were constantly changing as the process of urbanisation
intensified.39 Among those temporarily in the city, she identified a category called qaba (pagan), sometimes written xaba, which appears quite
often in her inscriptions (typed and written) as a classificatory shorthand. Consider the following inscription from her notes on hlonipha, the
language of deference and respect used by Xhosa women.
Hlonipha is still carried out by red and school, who only hlonipha the
bed, some the back of the house as well. – this speaks to male power and
authority in town. School people hlonipha too. ‘hlonipha in town – turned
me off ’. ‘Never went to school . . . intombe ya xaba. Was from a school
family, but never went to school.’40
This is one of the rare passages where she explicitly used ‘red’ and ‘school’
as opposing or twinned categories in a way which seems to suggest that
it would capture all of those who were not from the city, as if there were
only two categories of temporary residents – Red and School. In most
other cases, she uses the term qaba or xaba as a shorthand to identify
non-Christians and traditionalists on their own. She clearly sees a qaba
type and notes that there are particular places in the location where these
‘xaba types’ hang out. She does not make a particular effort to visit these
sites or to map out their social contours and cultural dynamics.
Part of the reason for this might have been, as I have suggested, that
Mrs Rubusana and Monica were not all that welcome there. In Ntibane
she worked around the gendered nature of social power and institutions
by accessing sites of male power and influence through indirect means.
Her work with healers, quite a number of whom were women, rather than
chiefs and headmen, gave her insights into political power and organisation which she could not access directly from male informants. There
were, however, also meetings and activities in the cattle byre which she
could not attend and had to find out about even more indirectly. In
East London, the vast majority of qaba migrants were men and they tended to hang out together at exclusive beer drinks with other men from
39
40
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 456.
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
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their home areas. These gatherings were the urban cultural equivalents
of meeting in the cattle byre, marking men from the same home area off
from others, with their own beer, male kin and amakhaya (‘home-boys’).
It would have been difficult for Monica, despite her considerable skill
and experience as a fieldworker, to access these spaces, especially given
the limited time she had for her fieldwork in East London.
By contrast, she felt very much at ease in the homes of the middle
class, especially those of female nurses and teachers who either came
from Lovedale or Healdtown, or were on their way back there for further
education and training. Consider the following inscription:
Pleasant home. Clean. Good taste. Intense interest in her work. Daughter
at Healdtown [school]. Going to Lovedale to nurse . . . Two teachers and a
teacher’s sister, a nurse, visiting for tea. Jolly party. Feel at home.41
Among the urban-born population she made a clear distinction in her
fieldnotes between what she called the ‘Christian obedient types’ and the
‘townee type’. She writes that one ‘could tell by looking. How? Stout
women, furnished houses, bolder – less dignified and reserved [than
the country women].’42 Later she confirms her categories: ‘There are
three kinds of categories here: reds/qaba, Christian obedient types, and
then the townee kind.’43 She continues: ‘Qaba tend to collect in certain
parts [of the location]. Qaba feel it is wrong to give money instead of
cattle for lobola. They also expect hlonipha.’44 The elite, the category
with which she identified most strongly, is seen to have complex and
subtle internal divisions, represented in the different ‘dialects and slang
of graduates from different mission stations and schools such as St Matthews, Lovedale, Healdtown’. The ‘townee type’ seemed to be a much
broader and inclusive social category for Monica and, despite various
passing remarks, is never properly defined in her notes or her book. In
one interesting inscription, she recorded how the ‘decent people’ (such
as the teachers) were in favour of segregation from the less respectable
members of society.
Sunday afternoon dress parade in the location. Last Sunday fight with
sticks between two women over which was the smartest. Teachers and
Mayaka strongly advocate the segregation of decent people from Gomorra
and Xabeni types.45
Categories, such as ‘Gomorra and Xabeni types’, are unfortunately never
fully elaborated on in her book (‘Gomorra’ – see below – was a section of
41
42
43
44
45
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
City Dreams, Country Magic
115
the location where independent brewers and prostitutes ruled the roost).
There are other cryptic references to different kinds of social and cultural
styles and identities in her notes that also do not make the journey into
the final ethnography. While one is disappointed at the loss of these
cultural nuances in the process of translation, it is clear that Monica
was not a big fan of the ‘townee type’. Her views here would certainly
have been influenced by ‘Mrs R’ and the young women she encountered
at tea parties and other social events of the location elite, whose own
position was under threat in a time of a swell of popular anger and
unrest.
Her dislike of the ‘townee type’ was also reflected in her view of location
matriarchs. One of her main areas of interest was the changing position
of women in town. She would publish an article on ‘the effects of contact
with Europeans on the status of Pondo women’ the following year.46 In
her book she provides valuable details about how women start to enter
the labour market and the competition between women for access to
domestic service in town, despite the very low wages paid there. In her
notes she provides the following description:
Frequently a girl may leave a mistress, another comes in her place. Later
No. 1 may wish a place again, and the Mistress meeting her, finding her
ready to work again wish to take her back, but No. 1 will refuse to go for fear
of being takata [accused of witchcraft] by No 2. ‘There are girls walking
about now looking for places whose mistresses have wanted them back, but
they are afraid to go lest the girl, who is turned out, takata them.’47
There is a strong sense in her ethnography of the competition among
girls and young women and their strong desire for money, and their willingness to do anything to get it. She is critical of this tendency and
believes it undermines the dignity of women in town. She was also
appalled at the number of teenage pregnancies and the children born
out of wedlock, and the general disregard among the youth of a proper
sense of culturally appropriate paths to motherhood and adulthood. In
her account of gender relations, it appears that adult women in town
basically have two options. They can pursue marriage and submit to
the will of their husbands, who will demand their obedience and support. For instance, as this note suggests, they will want money from
their wives and information about where they are and what they are
doing.
Married women hand over their wages to their husbands. Not necessary
to ask. Wages of women living with a man unmarried, entirely her own to
46
47
Monica Hunter, ‘The Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Status of Pondo
Women’, Africa, 7, 3 (1933), 259–276.
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
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do what she chooses. Again no need to ask. Interpreter. . . . [later] If a wife
wants to go anywhere to visit must always ask her husband’s permission.48
Or, as unmarried and independent women, their money is their own
and, as we know, many women in town with independent means chose
to avoid marriage and permanent liaisons with men in order to build up
‘matrifocal’ families.49 This trend was obviously more pronounced in the
1950s than when Monica was in the location in the early 1930s, but there
were nevertheless quite a number of independent women in this earlier
period who lived off the rents they could extract from migrants and the
income they made from beer.
It is interesting to compare Monica’s accounts of independent women
in town with those of Ellen Hellmann, who researched the independent brewers and matriarchs of Rooiyard in inner-city Johannesburg a few
years later, in 1933–34. For Monica the breakdown of family, the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancy, the commercial sale of beer and the
loose morals of those associated with the social economy of places like
‘Gomorra’ did not endear her to ‘stout’ and ‘bold’ urban matriarchs.
Her views were surely influenced by those of Dr and Mrs R and their
associates, but the lifestyles of these women also collided directly with
her moral compass and her sense of the urban nucleur family as a critical
social institution. Monica’s strong views on the family later underpinned
her impassioned critique of the migrant labour system and its impact on
African life, a topic taken forward in the work of her son Francis.50
What Monica saw, through the eyes of the Lovedale-schooled missionary’s daughter, as morally tainted and socially suspect, Hellmann
embraced as heroic and inventive, a completely rational and informed
response to social and economic conditions in the city.51 It is interesting how the views of two leading South African pioneers and female
anthropologists differed on this topic. Hellmann certainly did not have a
mission education, nor was she influenced by mission-educated elites in
the Rooiyard slum. She came from a Jewish family and community on
the Reef that had once lived in the inner city suburbs in the early period
of industrialisation in the city. Jews has lived in slums and were labelled
‘dirty and uncivilised’ by the city fathers and moral watchdogs, but had
pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.52 For Hellmann, the matriarchs
of Rooiyard seemed to be doing the same, and this was something she
48
49
50
51
52
Ibid.
See Pauw, The Second Generation.
See Francis Wilson, Labour in the South African Goldmines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972).
Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slumyard (Cape Town:
Oxford University Press, Rhodes Livingston Institute Papers, No. 13, 1948). Her study
had been completed in 1935 and submitted as a Wits MA thesis.
Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews of South Africa: An Illustrated History
(Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008), 84–103.
City Dreams, Country Magic
117
wanted to celebrate. For Monica the backstreets of East London raised
greater concern, where a shift away from culturally accepted notions of
the family and established social norms and values seemed much more
problematic.
What perturbed Monica most was the position of the youth. By 1930,
almost 40 per cent of location youths were not in school but out and
about, roaming the streets. There was a lost opportunity here that concerned her. Yet she was much more worried about the disrespect and
disobedience expressed by these youths, their apparent refusal to listen
to their parents and the absence of a ‘proper system of socialisation’ such
as she had found in Pondoland, a system that integrated the youth into
family and community life. In both her notes and in the ethnography
itself she raises the issue of the deteriorating situation of the youth in the
city. Some of the manifestations of the ‘youth as social problem’ are seen
in rising rates of teenage pregnancy, disrespect for parents, petty crime
and more generally in having a young generation idle on the streets. At
one point she records what may be her own views or perhaps those of
an informant: ‘When young boys and girls arrive at a strange town wanting work, magistrates should ask them where they have come from and
repatriate them at once.’53 Her concern about the position of the youth
and also of children remained important themes in her work and also in
urban studies more generally in the years to come.
The problem of ‘juvenile delinquency’ in urban areas became the subject of numerous investigations and commissions in later years.54 One of
the links that was commonly made in these inquiries was that between
the ‘fatherless family’ and the ‘troublesome youth’. It is not a link that
Monica explicitly made in her analysis, but it is certainly implicit in her
approach to the family. Her view on the youth in the city was that they
were thrust into a cultural vacuum where there were neither the institutions nor the mechanisms for effective social integration. This is why
she might have felt the need to advocate the repatriation of rural youth
back into the countryside where a system of socialisation was in place
and there seemed to be a certain integrity and coherence to youth socialisation. The problem for Monica was not the matrifocal family but the
negative consequences of urbanisation and ‘de-tribalisation’.
Hidden Transcripts: Dreaming in East London
Most Christian people do not believe in the possibility of being killed
by amatongo [dreams]. Though they do believe in death by supernatural
53
54
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
See A. S. Welsh, Report of the East London Municipal Native Commission of Enquiry (Native
Affairs Department, Pretoria: Government Printers, 1949), also known as ‘The Welsh
Commission’; see also Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000).
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means. But some do. Eg Padre of the Ethiopian church went to igqira who
said he was guliswa [made sick] by amatango [dreams] and should wear an
intambo yobulungu. He did so, and recovered.55
If we return finally to Clifford, we will note that his third type of field
writing is what he calls ‘transcription’. This is different from inscription, which captures and translates observations and social discourse in
the field. The process of transcription is associated with the recording
of myths, rituals or other extended indigenous texts, and tends to be
characterised by a one-on-one interview between the fieldworker and the
informant. Open-ended or structured interviews also allow for transcription, where the views of informants will be collected in full and written
down. Clifford sees transcription as a form of copying, which involves
the least transformation of the original meanings, but is still no innocent
process of translation.56
In Monica’s notes the household case studies offered opportunities for
transcription, for taking down life stories and other social and cultural
information in a coherent and sustained way that was not interrupted
or distracted by the flow of social discourse in situations of participant
observation. Unfortunately, she did not rewrite her household interviews
in full in the days after they were collected and seems to have worked
directly from the cryptic notes when writing up her Cambridge doctoral
thesis and later her book. Perhaps there was just not enough time in
East London to interrupt opportunities for fieldwork with the laborious
transcription of fieldnotes. Whatever the reason, the strategy adopted
by Monica in 1932 was one of compression rather than extension. She
used her typewriter to summarise each case into about five or six lines
rather than expand her notes into a longer discursive translation of the
interview. This is a great pity because there is much more in these notes
for us to reflect on in retrospect than she was able to analyse in the time
available. More specifically, I have found an intriguing and, in my view,
highly significant process of omission in the compression of Monica’s
fieldnotes, namely her decision to leave her detailed discussions with
her informants about dreams out of her summary of the content of her
household interviews.
Significantly, in virtually every household she entered in her 1932
research, she asked her informants what they had been dreaming about
and what they made of their dreams. In a number of cases the informants
said they could not remember their dreams, while others simply refused
to divulge their dreams. In her fieldnotes she acknowledges that there
was often some suspicion around the collection of dream material, and
55
56
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 59.
City Dreams, Country Magic
119
she was asked more than once if she was training as a sangoma (healer)
or working for one. Despite resistance, she pushed ahead with this line
of inquiry and managed to collect dreams (sometimes more than one
per household) in over seventy households. Unfortunately, as I have
suggested, she never wrote out the dreams in full, leaving only traces and
outlines of the dream material in her notes.
It is difficult to tell exactly when she developed her interest in dreams.
We do know she had read some of Freud’s work on dreams at Cambridge and also written an undergraduate essay on E. B. Tylor and the
role of dreams in primitive society.57 We can be reasonably sure she
would have read Malinowski’s discussion of ‘Dreams and Deeds’ in his
Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927). Malinowski wrote that he had
often tackled the subject of dreams directly in his work in the Trobriand
Islands, where ‘I asked my informants whether they had dreamt and,
if so, what their dreams had been.’ He claimed that the Trobrianders
were infrequent dreamers and wondered whether this was because they
were a ‘non-repressed society’, ‘a society among whom sex as such is in
no way restricted’. He also made a distinction between what he called
‘free dreams’ and ‘official dreams’, the latter being relatively fixed fantasies, which followed the contours of tradition.58 It is a moot point how
much Monica was influenced by these readings. But we do know she had
found in her Pondoland research that dreams offered important clues
towards understanding the everyday lives of people. Dreaming and the
interpretation of dreams by healers and diviners was a critical aspect of
pronouncing on fortune and misfortune. It is perhaps because of this that
she set out to ask every member of every urban household she entered
what they were dreaming about.
Given that Monica invested a great deal of time and energy in collecting dreams, it is surprising that dream narratives do not feature more
prominently in her ethnography on East London. There are accounts
of dreams in the text that relate to the continued role of rural magic
and superstition in the interpretation of urban life. The case mentioned
above of domestic workers who were reluctant to take each other’s
jobs because they feared being bewitched by other women is one of
the examples used in the text to show the pervasiveness of belief in
witchcraft in the location. Monica also showed how dreams feature in
the circulation of magical interpretations of good fortune and misfortune. It is clear from her analysis that there was a widespread belief
in magic despite the new rationalities of modernity that dominate the
urban space, and that these beliefs were held not only by pagans (qaba)
57
58
WC, G1, Monica Hunter, Student Essays.
Bronislaw M. Malinowski, ‘Dreams and Deeds’ in his Sex and Repression in Savage
Society (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 30–55.
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but Christians too. She concluded her section on magic in her book
thus:
We see then that magical beliefs held under tribal conditions survive practically intact under town conditions. There are some new developments to
meet new needs, and old medicines are put to new uses, a few ideas are
absorbed – the iziporo [ghosts] along with its antidotes, the horseshoe and
the hymn – but very few if any of the old ideas have disappeared.59
The dreams collected in East London in 1932 lend themselves to
more analysis than the simple confirmation that magical beliefs travelled
well between town and country. In the 1960s Max Gluckman observed
that urbanisation produced new anxieties that tested the limits of traditional belief systems and encouraged Africans to turn in new ‘directions
for supernatural aid’. He stressed that, in the city, ‘fears of witchcraft
have burgeoned and magic has blossomed’.60 He recognised, as EvansPritchard once remarked, that ‘new situations require new magic’. More
recently, scholars like Jean and John Comaroff, Peter Geschiere and
Filip De Boeck have connected dreams, anxieties and enchantments
with the uncertainties of modernity and the forces of millennial capitalism, seeing them as part and parcel of the ‘frenetic construction of
local modernities’.61 Clearly the proliferation of anxiety and witchcraft
predates the arrival of neoliberalism or millennial capitalism in African
cities and is perhaps less closely connected to large-scale economic forces
than some of these scholars have suggested. Indeed, in the 1940s, one
of Monica’s students at Fort Hare, Livingstone Mqotsi, found that the
growth of independent Churches in Port Elizabeth, a coastal city near
East London, was connected to the proliferation of witchcraft and spiritual insecurity there.62
Luise White has written about the circulation of stories of vampires
and blood suckers in colonial Nairobi and how these accounts critique
the colonial state and the exploitation of African people.63 In her analysis
59
60
61
62
63
Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 496.
Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London: Cohen and West, 1963),
141, 143.
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds, Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and
Power in Post-Colonial Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Peter
Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-Colonial Africa
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1997); Filip De Boeck, ‘The Divine Seed:
Children, Gift and Witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo’ in Filip De Boeck
and Alcinda Honwana, eds, Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Post-Colonial
Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). See also Terence Ranger, ‘Scotland Yard in the
Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult’, Africa,
77, 2 (2002), 272–283.
See Chapter 7 in this volume.
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2000).
City Dreams, Country Magic
121
vampire stories and magic are related to perceptions of the city and interpersonal relations within it, especially gender and generational relations
and tensions. The construction and circulation of vampire stories in East
Africa, White notes, were deliberately used to undermine the progress
and power of women in formerly male-dominated domains. Steve Pile
writes more generally of the image of vampires and the Dracula story in
the history of Western cities.
Cities are dense nodes in a wider web of bodies, information, goods and
ideas. This is not a new point in itself, but I am suggesting an underside –
an other worldliness – to all these arrangements. The vampire stories show
that the idea of mixing blood is feared and also desired in a variety of ways.
Desire and fear go hand in hand is the psychoanalytical point. The vampire
stories speak to very specific geographies that might not be best hunted in
the cold light of day, for some will barely reveal anything and others will
lurk in the shadows.64
In the same way that vampire stories reveal anxieties around the mixing
of blood, interacting with strangers and the general struggle of coping in
the city, so the dreams recorded by Monica speak directly about urban
fears, desires and changing identities.
On the topic of desire, Monica records a large number of dreams
about informants travelling to the countryside in search of their rural
homesteads and kin. These dreams often centre on the call of a ritual
or the need to return home due to sickness in the family. I quote some
examples from her household interview notes. In these notes Xhosa and
English are used interchangeably, expressing the tension between inscription and transcription. There is also a slippage between first and third
person (I and he/she). Her aim was to get the gist of the dreams, while
also wanting to translate the story in full using vernacular terms and
categories.
He dreamed he was home yesterday in Centani. Umda wabona ikhaya
nabantu [Mda saw a house with people]. Means that izihlobo zethu [our
friends], still visiting you and you are still in good health . . . [Interpretation]
Sometimes I feel very homesick.
Dreamed yesterday, many people at the umzi, meat killed. Killed to lungisa
umzi [heal the homestead]. While the beast was being killed saw two of
her deceased brothers. They also attended – lungisa umzi done time after
death. Thinks that the visit from the late brother means that another dini
[sacrifice] must be made as well as what must be done for the sick man.
Does not know whether killing will help the man. Did not see the bala
[colour] of the heart. – Wake up in the middle.
64
Steve Pile, ‘Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever Colonised City’ in Ryan Bishop,
John Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo, eds, Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and
Global Processes (London: Routledge, 2003), 285–286.
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Dreamed this before he was at home. Dreamed of umfana [young man]
who was in the country then. We went to the lands together, going to
inspect the lands. Came to a valley where there was long grass. I felt as if
I had caught a cold – was coughing badly. My friend asked what was the
matter. I said I do not know. I sneezed and wiped my nose. My whole body
was feverish (I was dreaming all along . . . ) When I returned home I found
that the friend, who I identified in the dream was very, very sick. He thinks
his dream had anticipated that.65
These dreams also articulated experiences of travel, like embarking on
the train to Johannesburg, looking for lost relatives on the Reef or most
commonly of the dangers and trepidation of crossing rivers. In the first
dream the fear of travelling to Johannesburg and falling in the river are
clearly connected, suggesting fear and an image of being swallowed.
Dreamed of going to JHB and felt uncomfortable leaving EL. Dreams of
the train leaving, waiting to catch the train. Also dreams of falling into
water, like a river in flood. As I was standing on the bank of the river, it
seemed to give way and I fell in. Had not seen a flooded river recently
before I fell in.
Dreamt that the wife of her father’s eldest brother who died in Johannesburg
came here, and she ran out to see her. They were still on their way to meet
each other when she woke. She thinks her targo[?] was visiting her, coming
to see abantwana [children]. Not afraid glad it was only an ordinary visit.
She dreamed of great river with a high bank. She was afraid to wash in it.
She crossed it in spite of being afraid. She was alone. Thinking of the sea,
she has never seen the sea.66
A number of Monica’s other respondents said they dreamed about
being harassed or arrested by the police. This dream was pervasive and
must be seen as a reflection of the extent to which residents feared, on a
daily basis, being caught without their passes or residents’ permits. There
were also dreams of running away: ‘Dreamed of the police and running
away. Not biswa [accused of theft], but swept away. Woke up afraid. Also
dreamed of crossing a river and running away.’ Another young woman:
‘Dreams of the police chasing her, also dreams of being caressed by
her mother and father.’ Another informant dreamt of a specific African
detective named Seluku finding her and sending her to jail.67
Quite a number of women dreamed of becoming isolated in the city
or of losing children. One woman ‘Dreamed of umanyano young women
[women’s church group] walking through the valley, all dressed in white
to hold revival meeting in Cambridge [a suburb of East London]. Woke
up when they were going up the hill. No other women there (perhaps
65
66
67
WC, uncat., East London Fieldnotes (Monica Hunter).
Ibid.
Ibid.
City Dreams, Country Magic
123
being alone?). These men do not dress in white. Does not know what it
means.’
There were dreams of snakes and money, of the umamlambo [waterwomen] and the desire of wealth and material success in the city. A
common version of these dreams is this:
Dreamed of onyaka [a snake] . . . was gliding over some trees, did not look
exactly like a snake, but rather like a fish with fins. There were tall trees
outside the houses. Also fah fee (scheme for money making) gold money
and won. She woke up anxious because dreaming about a snake means
temptation. She woke up with the snake gliding over the trees.68
By choosing not to document this material in published form, Monica
missed an opportunity to show how the social and imaginative fabric
of the urban and the rural were intertwined in the everyday worlds and
interpretative frameworks of urban residents who operated across different cultural fields and experiences. Instead of showing how the ‘townee
category’ was catapulted from the moral world of the countryside to the
immoral world of the city, she might have used this information on dreams
to comment more on the limits of change. Such a discussion would have
added a layer of complexity to her analysis of ‘the townee type’, revealing
how notions of the rural were reworked in the city by people who were
not necessarily part of the qaba category. This might have thrown light
on the complex politics she encountered in the location, where the rights
and concession politics of African urban elites was losing ground to the
politics of African independent Churches and radical labour unions. A
more detailed exploration of dreams might have revealed how people
were grasping for the city while longing for the countryside in different
ways and how their sense of identity was not adequately addressed by the
rights-based politics of ANC elites.
Such a discussion would have provided an interesting prelude to later
discussions of the politics of the 1940s and 1950s when new expressions of Africanism swept through East London’s locations with the rise
of the ANC Youth League and the launch of the Defiance Campaign.
Confronted by an increasingly repressive state, many ordinary East Bank
residents turned back to their roots to redefine and re-evaluate their social
and political identities as they united behind the call Mayibuye iAfrica –
Come Back, Africa. In these records of dreams there are important clues
as to how such identities were formed as in-between imaginaries of
town and country. In Monica’s defence, one should mention that she
did openly acknowledge the pre-planned focus of her urban fieldwork
and admitted that the process was unsatisfactory by her own exacting
standards. She would later comment that her urban fieldwork was too
68
Ibid.
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short and too limited in scope to unravel all the social contradictions she
encountered.69
Conclusion
Cities are scary and impersonal, and the best most of us can manage is
a fragile hold on our routes through the streets. We cling to friends and
institutions; exaggerate the importance of belonging, fear being alone too
much.70
This chapter has revisited Monica’s 1932 East London fieldnotes and the
ethnography she wrote up on that basis in Reaction to Conquest. We may
well wonder why this early urban anthropological research in a South
African city has been virtually forgotten (by contrast say with that of
her contemporary Ellen Hellmann), while Monica’s rural ethnographies
remain a constant source of reference for academics, development workers and communities themselves as they struggle to reclaim their land
rights. True, in the Cambridge tradition of her day, she went into the
field relatively unprepared in terms of the background reading of classic
works in rural and urban studies. When she arrived in East London to
study the urban locations there, she had not read any of the standard
sociological texts on urban life.
The main reason why Monica’s urban anthropology of East London’s
locations has been largely overlooked is that it was not written up as
a separate urban study, but as part of a book which is known in the
discipline as a classic rural ethnography. In fact, when a popular paperback third edition of Reaction to Conquest was published in Cape Town
in 1979, the entire social change section of the book, over a hundred
pages, was cut out. In the Preface, Monica wrote that the decision was a
direct result of the publishers’ opinion that the full text would make the
publication uneconomic; but she was also quick to explain that she felt
her account of town and farm life was more superficial than her work in
Pondoland and therefore less significant. Monica’s early urban ethnography has thus remained hidden partly because she downplayed its
importance compared to the Pondoland ethnography. She concluded:
‘What is in demand is an account of a way of life that no longer exists.’71
A detailed reading of her fieldnotes can reveal some of the underlying
assumptions and approaches in her work. Using Clifford’s distinction
69
70
71
For her expression of this sense of dissatisfaction to Pamela Reynolds in later years, see
Chapter 10.
Jonathan Raban, Soft City (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 225.
The first edition of 1936 and the second edition of 1961 were unabridged, although
the second edition had fewer photographs. The third edition cut out the social change
section: see Monica Wilson, Reaction to Conquest (Cape Town: David Philip, 1979, 3rd
edition, abridged), xiv–xv.
City Dreams, Country Magic
125
between different types of writing in the field – inscription, transcription
and description – I have tried to piece together a perspective on her urban
research: it appears that Monica instantly recognised the power of the
city as a vehicle for social change and was somewhat shocked at how
rapidly the superficialities of modern life had been absorbed in the city.
Immediately, like Simmel in his classic work on money and mental life in
the city, she recognised the power of money and commodities there – how
nothing was free in the locations, how everyone desired money, and how
it seemingly eroded social relations and mutual obligations. The contrast
between the money-driven urban environment and the obligation-driven
rural environment was forcefully brought home to her. She maintained
that not even beer was transacted for free in the city. She was also amazed
at how everyone tried their luck on the horses, with fah-fee or some other
‘get rich quick’ scheme. Monica’s urban anthropology is very different
from that of the Mayers and their colleagues who came to East London
in the 1950s and focused on processes of the re-invention of tradition
in the city and the continued power of rural outlooks and orientations
there. She was astonished and, to some extent, frightened by the speed of
change and the possible consequences of the breakdown of social values
and institutions.
Her analysis of the internal workings and social dynamics of the
locations could have been a little more critical and reflexive. Reading
her fieldnotes, it seems to me that she essentially worked with an idea of
three broad social categories in town: the qaba or xaba (rural-orientated,
pagan) type, the mission-educated type (well-groomed, decent, upright
Christians) and the ‘townee type’ (which she personalised in one note
as a stout woman with a house full of furniture). These categories were
rather morally loaded and never really properly developed sociologically
in this context of social change. Indeed, as I see it, her prejudice against
the so-called ‘townee type’ was infused with the ideological perspectives
of the likes of Mrs Rubusana and her Lovedale friends in the location. But
Monica was ultimately more interested in social groups than social
categories and felt that participation in localised social groups fundamentally shaped how people experienced urban life. This tenet
continued to guide her later research with Archie Mafeje on Langa in
Cape Town, which resulted in a book with the subtitle, ‘Social Groups
in an African Township’.72
Given the amount of time she spent collecting dreams, she had relatively little to say about them in her academic text by way of interpretation
and analysis, and relating these to perceptions and politics of urban life.
In fact, comparing Monica’s East London fieldnotes with the text she
72
On her collaboration with Mafeje on the Langa book, see Chapter 8.
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eventually produced, I found that the most striking omission was her failure to translate the transcripts she collected on dreams into sociological
and political analysis. There are critical insights within this material that
could have been used to strengthen her central thesis of social change
in the city. As I read the dreams, they provide evidence of a high level of
anxiety among her informants, who are fearful of what the future in the
city might hold for them. They dreamed of being chased by policemen,
being arrested, and being isolated and alone in the city. Their dreams
included the dangers of travel and the appetites of rivers and snakes for
swallowing them up. There were also many dreams of the integrity of
rural social relations, of absent kin and of the warmth and congeniality
of the family and friends at the rural umzi. Monica could have used this
material to emphasise the anxieties and contradictions of social change
and relate these more closely to the political mobilisation and upheaval
taking place in the location then. Her inability to realise a broader
perspective was not only related to the limitations of the fieldwork,
but also, as I have argued, had much to do with her interpreters, who
inevitably mediated her view of city and its social and political contours.
.
Part 2
Bunyakyusa
Figure P.2. A gifted young fieldworker: Monica’s future husband Godfrey during
his first five months of fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, September 1934 to January 1935.
He returned to South Africa to marry Monica in the Hogsback in February 1935
before they went on honeymoon and then resumed fieldwork in Bunyakyusa as
a husband-and-wife team from March 1935 in what would be ‘one of the most
intensive ethnographic field studies ever done’.
Photographer (likely): Godfrey and Monica’s future research assistant Leonard
Mwaisumo. WC, uncat. From box of ‘Negatives belonging to Mr. G.B. Wilson’.
4
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers:
Monica and Godfrey in Bunyakyusa
Rebecca Marsland
Well anyway I’ve roped Monica in and we are working out a theory of
society as an equilibrium together. She sets her teeth in face of my more
flighty phrases and, muttering ‘rhetorical idiot’, proceeds to probe them
with Pondo pins and break them with Nyakyusa hammers and then
comes to me saying ‘Well of course the original formulation was absurd
and meaningless but there is just this grain of sense I found in it – and
lo, on her palm the truth!’
Godfrey Wilson to Audrey Richards, 26 March 19401
Monica and Godfrey Wilson worked together in Bunyakyusa, southwest Tanganyika (now Rungwe and Kyela districts in Tanzania) between
1934 and 1938.2 This extract from Godfrey’s letter to the anthropologist Audrey Richards was written from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, where Godfrey had been
appointed director. They had flown there direct from Bunyakyusa and
were now working on their jointly authored ‘Analysis of Social Change
Based on Observations in Central Africa’.3 Godfrey describes aspects of
their working style that are central to this chapter. He, perhaps unwittingly, refers to the gendered nature of their fieldwork sites. Monica had
carried out her first research on her own in Pondoland. The analytical
tools that Godfrey attributes to this field-site are ‘Pondo pins’ – pins
1
2
3
WC, B4.7 Correspondence to and from Audrey Richards: Godfrey Wilson/Audrey
Richards, 26 March 1940.
A conference grant from the University of Edinburgh and a research grant from the
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland funded two trips in 2008 and 2009 to
visit the Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers held at the University of Cape Town. Many
thanks to Lesley Hart and colleagues who made archival research so easy for a novice.
I must also thank Andrew Bank for his ‘good company’ in the archives, and beyond:
he has picked out more archival extracts in this chapter than I have acknowledged in
the text, and offered close reading and commentary on drafts. Lyn Schumaker, Janet
Carsten, Toby Kelly, Richard Baxstrom and Ian Harper have all made useful and critical
comments on early drafts. Timothy Mwakasekele was a close companion during the
writing of this chapter, and translated some of the more difficult passages in Kinyakyusa.
Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change: Based on Observations
in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).
129
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being most usually associated with the feminine pastime of needlework.
In contrast, in their joint fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, Monica had access
to ‘Nyakyusa hammers’, an apt metaphor given that Bunyakyusa was
more easily approached with a masculine sensibility, as we will see. One
of the themes of this chapter is the gendered division of labour that
Godfrey and Monica undertook during their years in Bunyakyusa, and
the way in which this interacted with the gender roles of Nyakyusa men
and women.4
Godfrey’s vignette also reflects the habit of joint authorship that he
and Monica were developing. It is probable that they intended to publish
both joint and separate publications on their Nyakyusa research, but
after Godfrey’s untimely and tragic death in 1944 Monica wrote up and
published their findings in four major monographs. Even though she is
the only author named on the title pages of these books, they are in a way
co-authored. In this chapter, I take up her colleague David HammondTooke’s suggestion that this work can be seen as a memorial to her
beloved Godfrey.5 The Nyakyusa years represent a period of their life
together when Godfrey was at his happiest. After his death, Monica took
on the considerable task of transcribing and organising material from his
78 field notebooks, bringing her knowledge of Bunyakyusa to bear on
his material.6 This labour of the heart was one way for her to keep him,
and her memories of these precious times together, close to her for the
rest of her life. As a consequence, data from much of her own fieldwork
appears as little more than an appendage to Godfrey’s, especially in the
first three of the Nyakyusa monographs.
The chapter is based on my reading of the Monica and Godfrey Wilson
archives at the University of Cape Town. I have examined much of the
Wilsons’ correspondence with their contemporaries, mostly written while
they were in Bunyakyusa, and later when Godfrey took up his position as
director of the RLI. The letters open up a fascinating picture of the closeknit world of anthropologists working in Central and southern Africa in
the 1930s and 1940s. Unfortunately, yet for understandable reasons,7
I was not permitted to read the very personal letters between Monica
and Godfrey themselves; it is likely that these would reveal otherwise
inaccessible discussions about their research in Bunyakyusa during the
period when Monica was invalided out of the field, being the time they
were communicating by letter.
4
5
6
7
The importance of the masculine fieldwork style of Godfrey Wilson is the subject of a
paper that I am preparing for publication.
Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists, 1920–1990, 82–
83.
WC, D1.1 GW’s notebooks 1–79 (no. 12 missing).
See the Introduction to this volume for further discussion of these restrictions on public
access.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
131
Figure 4.1. Settlement of a dispute. The anthropologist (Godfrey Wilson) is sitting with the court. On his right is the chief Mwaihojo, on his left Kasitile, the
rainmaker. Behind him (in a topee) is Mwaisumo the clerk, and Mwakionde,
famous as a doctor and maker of lions. In the background is a half-built hut.
(Original caption in the 1951 monograph Good Company.)8
Like Monica, I have transcribed Godfrey’s notebooks, in addition to
a considerable proportion of the thousands of looseleaf pages that make
up her own field material, and so have some insight into the scale of the
task she took on in publishing (almost exhaustively) their field material.
Reading the Wilson fieldnotes also proved an evocative experience for
me, as I have spent about three years between 2000 and 2009 carrying
out ethnographic research in the southern, lowland part of Bunyakyusa
(now Kyela District). Even though over sixty years separate our time in
the region, there are continuities that make it possible to imagine quite
clearly some of the fieldwork scenes as they reveal themselves in the
archives.
One of the few photographs of Godfrey Wilson in Bunyakyusa shows
him at the court of the chief Mwaihojo (Figure 4.1). Seated on the ground
and flanked by three figures, who all feature in the monographs, he is
clad in the tropical gear familiar to us from images of colonial Africa –
topee, khaki shorts, long socks and a crisp white shirt. The only wardrobe
item distinguishing him from the chief Mwaihojo, sitting to his right, and
8
Monica Wilson, Good Company: Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New
York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957),
Figure 15.
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Figure 4.2. Monica Wilson taking notes during an interview in Bunyakyusa,
1955.9
his translator and research assistant (the ‘clerk’) Leonard Mwaisumo
behind him, are his polished shoes. You have to peer closely to identify
the white anthropologist. Seated to his left is Kasitile the rainmaker, a
ritual specialist – a man whom Godfrey, Monica noted, regarded as akin
to his own grandfather – in a robe and fez. Standing and facing them are
presumably the court officials and participants in the case. Godfrey does
not appear to be writing – there is no visible notebook.
None of the photographs of Monica in Bunyakyusa have been published in any of her four well-illustrated monographs. This seems in
keeping with how the monographs prioritise Godfrey’s work. One shows
her facing away from the camera, shaking hands with a man. In another
we see her sitting on a chair outside a man’s house (Figure 4.2). Holding
her notes with one hand, she is staring intently at her informant, who is
sitting on the same kind of chair. In the foreground a man and a woman
stand – the woman is watching Monica, the man stares towards the camera. Behind them all is a small audience of children in the shadows of a
tree.
These photographs invite an interpretation based on my own knowledge of the field-site and a reading of Godfrey’s notebooks and Monica’s
fieldnotes and reminiscences. Godfrey, seated on the ground, does not
9
WC, Photograph by Francis Wilson who accompanied Monica when she revisited
Bunyakyusa in 1955.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
133
distinguish himself from his three close friends and informants. All four
men are looking up at the court from the same position. He is in ‘Good
Company’ – sharing a sociability that Monica later argued, in the first
Nyakyusa monograph, was so important to ‘Nyakyusa values’.10
In contrast, we can see that Monica’s relationship to her informants
is more awkward. She cannot do fieldwork by behaving like a Nyakyusa
woman as Godfrey can by behaving like a Nyakyusa man. A Nyakyusa
woman would not sit on a chair. In order to speak to any man, she would
crouch close to the ground, at a respectful distance, and wait for him
to notice her. She would avoid his gaze, not fix him with what was presumably her ‘own peculiar hunting look’11 as Godfrey once described
Monica’s expression when she was looking for ‘social facts’. These photographs remind us that Monica was less able to develop the same
kind of intense and intimate relationship with her informants as her
husband.
This chapter traces how the different fieldwork styles of Monica and
Godfrey emerged. Sharing a common project and ideals, they nevertheless diverged as their backgrounds, training, personalities and gender
pushed them in different directions. Godfrey was gregarious, thriving
in the masculine company of his Nyakyusa informants, and engaging
them in conversation. Monica was more reserved, standing back a little,
observing life in all its forms as it went on – not just of her informants,
but of the plants and landscape around her.
The Nyakyusa Trilogy
Monica and Godfrey’s fieldwork in Bunyakyusa has been described by
J. D. Y. Peel as ‘one of the most intensive ethnographic field studies ever
done’.12 Between them they carried out over four years of fieldwork,
which Monica was later to write up as four monographs: Good Company (1951), Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (1957), Communal
Rituals of the Nyakyusa (1959) and For Men and Elders (1977).13 Andrew
Bank has dubbed the first three of these ‘the Nyakyusa Trilogy’, justified
10
11
12
13
Monica Wilson, Good Company.
Letter from Godfrey Wilson to Monica Wilson cited in Seán Morrow, ‘“This Is from the
Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished
paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June
2008).
J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Wilson [née Hunter], Monica (1908–1982)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).
Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York
and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1951);
Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957); Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959); For Men and
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because the last monograph was published some twenty years later.14
The trilogy is of interest here, because it reflects most closely the product
of Monica and Godfrey’s anthropological marriage, especially when read
together with their research fieldnotes.
The years in Bunyakyusa were a golden period for them. They were
warmly welcomed into Nyakyusa life. They divided up the fieldwork –
Godfrey was primarily interested in ‘pagan’ religion, and Monica was
to look at Christianity, education, and women.15 Apart from Monica’s
severe bouts of malaria, fieldwork was easy for them, especially for Godfrey, who was quickly drawn into a world of masculine sociability, establishing a wide network of informants and friendships. This was despite the
fact that they were in Rungwe District at a time when major political and
economic changes were being introduced there by the British administration, and religious values were under challenge from Moravian, Lutheran
and Scottish missions.16 They travelled all over the district, working
from three main bases – Mwaya on the shore of Lake Nyasa, Isumba
(Selya) further north in the highlands, and Ilolo in the highlands near
the Moravian Mission at Rungwe (see Figure 4.3). In her letters home,
Monica regularly told her father that ‘the days are full’ – fieldwork in
rural Bunyakyusa was eventful then, as now, and fieldworkers can find
themselves struggling to keep up with a ‘steady stream of visitors’, marital conflicts, court cases, weddings and funerals. Thus happily occupied,
Godfrey, who had earlier suffered from what he described as a ‘nervous
breakdown’,17 seemed to find an equilibrium.
Events took a tragic turn, however, after they left Bunyakyusa. On 1
May 1938, Godfrey took up an appointment as the first director of the
RLI in Northern Rhodesia. Here he investigated labour conditions on
the mines. Sadly his sociable research style proved to be too much for the
white settlers of the Copperbelt, and he was criticised for ‘fraternising
with the Africans’. Furthermore he had gathered ‘explosive’ evidence
that Africans were becoming permanently urbanised, which contradicted
the premises of colonial labour policy.18 This, combined with Godfrey’s
14
15
16
17
18
Elders: Change in the Relations of Generations and of Men and Women among the NyakyusaNgonde People 1875–1971 (London and New York: International African Institute and
Africana for the IAI, 1977).
Andrew Bank, ‘Monica Hunter Wilson’ in Robert Gordon, Andrew P. Lyons, and
Harriet D. Lyons, eds, Fifty Key Anthropologists (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), 255–260.
WC, D11, Correspondence with International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernlé, 9 May 1935, Isumba.
Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in
the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).
Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 11.
Monica Wilson, ‘The First Three Years, 1938–41’, African Social Research, 24 (1977),
283.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
135
Figure 4.3. Map of the Rungwe District in Bunyakyusa showing the three main
fieldwork sites of the Wilsons: Mwaya on the lake shore, Isumba in the highlands
near the village of Lupata, and Ilolo village near Rungwe Mission Station.19
pacificism and his unwillingness to advise African men to sign up for the
military, made his position untenable and he resigned in April 1941.20
After that, Godfrey enlisted in the South African Medical Corps and was
posted in Egypt and South Africa. He found the boredom of army life
and his separation from Monica ‘quite intolerable’, but they continued
to correspond and work together on the manuscript for the ‘Analysis
of Social Change’. On leave over Christmas 1943–1944 his depression
returned, and continued in a severe form until in May 1944 he took his
own life.21
19
20
21
Map III in Monica Wilson, Good Company, insert between pages 16 and 17.
Richard Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Godfrey Wilson and the RhodesLivingstone Institute’ in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New
York: Humanity Books, 1973), 173–197.
Morrow, ‘This is from the Firm’, 12.
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As we have seen, all four of the Nyakyusa monographs were published after Godfrey’s death. In addition Monica and Godfrey published
a total of 18 articles on the Nyakyusa research: he wrote seven papers
between 1936 and 1939;22 she one book chapter,23 and ten journal articles between 1937 and 1976.24 Their co-authored ‘Analysis of Social
Change’ fits uneasily into these publications. Drawing on material from
Pondoland, Bunyakyusa, Audrey Richard’s work on the Bemba, and
Godfrey’s work on the Copperbelt, it can be read as a reaction to the
unpleasant race relations they encountered in Northern Rhodesia. Monica continued to work on the Nyakyusa material right up to her death in
1982, hoping to produce the Kinyakyusa–English dictionary and grammar – but this last task was never accomplished.25
The best known of the Nyakyusa trilogy, Good Company, deals with
the unique ‘age villages’ through which political authority was handed
over from old to young men once a generation. Curiously, this created
its own little controversy, as some scholars found it difficult to believe
the Wilsons’ account.26 The failure of any of these new scholars to offer
22
23
24
25
26
Godfrey Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Law: A Theoretical Introduction to the Study of Law in
East Africa’, Man, 36 (1936), 50; ‘An African Morality’, Africa, 9, 1 (1936), 75–99; ‘An
Introduction to Nyakyusa Society’, Bantu Studies, 10, 3 (1936), 253–291; ‘Introduction to Nyakyusa Law’, Africa, 10, 1 (1937), 16–36; ‘The Land Rights of Individuals
among the Nyakyusa’, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 (1938)); ‘The Constitution of Ngonde’, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 3
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 (1939)); ‘Nyakyusa Conventions of
Burial’, Bantu Studies, 13, 1 (1939), 1–31.
Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Kinship’ in Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde,
eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950),
111–139.
Monica Wilson, ‘An African Christian Morality’, Africa, 10, 2 (1937), 265–292; ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 79 (1949), 21–25; ‘Witch
Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56, 4 (1951), 307–313;
‘Nyakyusa Ritual and Symbolism’, American Anthropologist, 56, 2 (1954), 228–241;
‘Joking Relationships in Central Africa’, Man, 57 (1957), 111–112; Divine Kings and the
Breath of Men (The Frazer Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959);
‘Traditional Art among the Nyakyusa’, South African Archaeological Bulletin, 19 (1964),
57–63; ‘The Expansion of the Nyakyusa’, Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 331;
‘Letter’, Africa, 45, 2 (1975), 202–205; ‘Zig-Zag Change’, Africa, 46, 4 (1976), 399–
409.
The dictionary consists of index boxes full of cards each containing items of vocabulary,
and there is also a draft of a Nyakyusa grammar. Both can be found in WC. Monica
had hoped to publish the ‘Ki-Nyakyusa English Dictionary’ in the University of Cape
Town’s Centre for African Studies series (WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson Correspondence
with Audrey Richards, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 12 Feb. 1981 [Hogsback]).
Simon Charsley, The Princes of Nyakyusa (Nairobi: East African Publishing House,
1969) and ‘Letter’, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 422–423; Michael G. McKenny, ‘The Social
Structure of the Nyakyusa: A Re-evaluation’, Africa, 43, 1 (1973), 91–107 and ‘Letter’, Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 423–424; Wright, German Missions and ‘Nyakyusa Cults and
Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century’ in Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion (London: Heinemann Educational,
1971).
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
137
any evidence to back up their reinterpretations of the Wilsons’ material
clearly irked Monica who, in a letter to Africa, painstakingly went through
her evidence – including Godfrey’s eyewitness accounts of a part of the
ubusoka [‘coming out’] ceremony27 – and pointed out that none of these
scholars had even visited Bunyakyusa.28
Her two subsequent volumes on ritual, Rituals of Kinship29 and Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, represent the richest ethnography that the
Wilsons produced. Their symbolist analysis anticipates the turn to meaning in anthropology, and the nuanced accounts of localised variation in
ritual make it difficult to accuse Monica and Godfrey of holding onto any
simplified notion of a singular ‘Nyakyusa’ identity.30 These volumes had
a considerable influence on Victor Turner, who dedicated The Forest of
Symbols to Monica and followed Godfrey’s method of asking indigenous
specialists to interpret symbols for him.31
Although authorship for the trilogy is attributed to Monica alone,
the books read as if they were co-authored. They had written together
‘before’ – The Analysis of Social Change was the most notable of their
collaborations.32 Their posthumous joint authorship seems to be more
than just a product of their joint fieldwork – Godfrey’s voice is evident
in the analytical sections where Monica discusses the conclusions drawn
from the empirical material presented, and much of the text was originally
written by Godfrey – his fieldnotes are frequently reproduced, sometimes
word for word. More substantially, the second chapter, ‘Burial Rites’,
in Rituals of Kinship is a shortened version of Godfrey’s 1939 paper,
‘Nyakyusa Conventions of Burial’.
27
28
29
30
31
32
In Communal Rituals of the Bunyakyusa Monica Wilson described this as ‘the ritual
which arose the greatest excitement in Bunyakyusa and in which every man woman
and child participates . . . when the heirs of a chief are acknowledged as rulers and the
government of the country is handed over to them and to their village headman’. It was,
she continued, something that occurred but ‘once in a generation’, ‘thrice in a century’
(49).
Monica Wilson, ‘Letter’.
This was originally to have been titled To Whom Do They Pray?, but Oxford University
Press considered this ‘too romantic’ and feared it might ‘put off the more scholarly
public’ and hinder sales (WC, uncat. corr., Box 1, International Africa Institute/Monica
Wilson, 2 March 1955, London).
The anthropologist James Ellison argues that the Wilsons contributed to the invention
of a ‘coherent’ and singular Nyakyusa identity, but the fieldnotes suggest otherwise,
as does the presentation of complexity in the monographs, most notably in Rituals of
Kinship in which Monica goes to great lengths to document the difference between
rituals in Kukwe, Selya and Ngonde. See James G. Ellison, ‘Transforming Obligations,
Performing Identity: Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’ (unpublished D. Phil.
thesis, University of Florida, 1999).
Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1967), 19; Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 83.
The other co-authored piece was a short article advising amateur anthropologists on field
method. Godfrey Wilson and Monica Hunter, ‘The Study of African Society’, RhodesLivingstone Papers, 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 [1939]).
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It is difficult, therefore, to avoid surmising that there was a shift in
the balance of the co-authorship after Godfrey’s death. Godfrey’s work
takes precedence, in contrast to The Analysis of Social Change and ‘The
Study of African Society’, where his work on ‘conservative’ customs of
the Nyakyusa is presented as a preliminary to understanding the social
change on which Monica’s research was focused. In the trilogy, the ‘conservative’ is foregrounded, with social change taking a back seat. In the
sections where Monica’s research is directly addressed we can see that
in Good Company just ten pages out of 177, tagged on at the ends of
chapters, are devoted to Christianity and change; in Rituals of Kinship a
mere two pages of 233 address Monica’s work on Christians; while in
Communal Rituals she allows herself a more substantial section – the penultimate two chapters making up almost a quarter of the whole book.33
Any appreciation of the Nyakyusa trilogy must seek explanation for this
curious self-effacement.
On the one hand this could be interpreted as a consequence of her
shorter and less intense period in the field, compared with his. Certainly
her research agenda, which addressed social change (the influence of
Christianity and education), was arguably more innovative than Godfrey’s emphasis on ‘pagan’ ritual, which was a more conventional reconstruction of an idealised past. Their joint endeavours however, contradict
this simplified distinction: The Analysis of Social Change points in a different direction, one that puts Europeans and Africans in the same frame, a
direction that was to be pursued by Max Gluckman and the Manchester
School.34 One wonders therefore whether the Nyakyusa monographs
might have been different, with less emphasis on reconstructing Nyakyusa ‘pagan’ ritual, had Godfrey lived on and Monica and Godfrey written
them together. If we consider the Nyakyusa trilogy as a memorial to Godfrey, that reflected Monica’s ‘obligation’ to get his work out, as opposed
to their work out, then the relative analytical conservativism, and the
positioning of Monica’s work as supplementary rather than central, is
easier to understand. However, if we compare her early draft chapters
on her Nyakyusa work with Reaction to Conquest, and her fieldnotes with
Godfrey’s, it is also difficult to avoid concluding that her data, for example
on Christians, was simply not as rich as her notes on Pondoland and
Godfrey’s on ritual.35 Reasons for this include differences in gender and
personality as well as fieldwork style. Given this, we can appreciate Monica’s achievement in writing the Nyakyusa trilogy. It was a remarkable
33
34
35
Monica Wilson, Good Company, 38–45, 127–132; Rituals of Kinship, 197–199; Communal Rituals, 166–202, 203–215.
Hugh Macmillan, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift: Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation
and the Common Society’, African Affairs, 94, 374 (1995), 39–65.
Andrew Bank, personal communication.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
139
feat of empathetic writing that drew more closely on Godfrey’s findings
than on her own.
The Anthropological Marriage
Husband and wife teams loom large in anthropology, but wives tended
to contribute ‘both scholarly and domestic labour to their husbands’
careers’ rather than focusing on their own work.36 Godfrey and Monica’s
relationship seemed to have been quite different, with each taking the
lead at different phases of their life together. Important differences in
their education, family background, and gender shaped their fieldworker
personalities.
Trained in anthropology and history at Girton College, Cambridge
with Jack Driberg (himself a student of Malinowski) and Thomas
Hodson,37 Monica was the more experienced ethnographer. She was carrying out fieldwork in Pondoland when Godfrey graduated from Oxford
with a first in classics in 1931, and her resulting monograph Reaction to
Conquest was published while they were working in Bunyakyusa. She was
already established as an anthropologist by the time they married, so it
is unimaginable that she would ever have described herself, as did Edith
Turner, as merely ‘“an (unofficial) anthropological fieldworker” who had
done “quite a lot of research in Africa”.’38 Nevertheless, Monica was not
to be quite her husband’s equal in the field.
Godfrey’s interest in anthropology developed from his interest in
Monica.39 After Oxford, he rose quickly within the small world of anthropology under Malinowski’s wing at the London School of Economics.
Malinowski soon came to the opinion that Godfrey ‘is the coming man
in anthropology, he is bound to become, barring unforeseen accidents, the
leading British anthropologist of British extraction. I have not had a really
first-rate student both as regards intelligence, application and character,
of purely English nationality and heredity. Godfrey Wilson is one. He is,
in every respect, a first-rate man’ (my emphasis).40
Sadly, this period in London was marred by Godfrey’s clinical depression, which must have led to serious doubts about his suitability for the
demands of fieldwork, and in retrospect we can see that his eventual and
36
37
38
39
40
Richard Handler, ‘Anthropology’s Other Others’ in Handler ed., Significant Others:
Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004), 3.
See Chapter 1.
Matthew Engelke, ‘The Endless Conversation: Fieldwork, Writing and the Marriage of
Victor and Edith Turner’ in Handler, ed., Significant Others, 6–50.
Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 6.
WC, B4.4, Godfrey Wilson Correspondence with Bruno Malinowski, Malinowski/Mr
N. H. Hall of the Rockefeller Foundation, copied to Godfrey Wilson, 20 Feb. 1935,
[London].
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tragic death was eerily predicted in Malinowski’s recommendation. The
historian Seán Morrow has described Godfrey’s feelings of ‘despondency,
self-disgust, tentativeness and dependency’, which were to disappear on
his arrival in Bunyakyusa to even Monica’s surprise. Before she joined
him in the field she wrote, ‘I was so afraid you were too modest for an
anthropologist.’41 As we will see, Bunyakyusa was an environment where
Godfrey was able to thrive.
Monica’s childhood at the liberal Lovedale mission in South Africa
seemed to have the effect of cultivating a familiarity with the Africans
with whom she had been schooled, and later went on to study, while
paradoxically inhibiting her ability to feel equally at home in all social
contexts in Bunyakyusa. Unlike Godfrey, she already had a ‘place’ in
African societies. As with her work in Pondoland,42 she appeared to have
been most comfortable working close to a mission. The cool highland
landscape evoked memories of her childhood home in Hogsback. At
Ilolo, near the Rungwe mission, they had a small Nyakyusa-style house
with a chimney, a ‘mudded floor’ and a thatched roof that leaked during
the rains. She wrote to her father that ‘it even smelt like Hogsback, which
has an immense vista not unlike some of those that can be seen from
Rungwe’.43 In a sense, Monica was never very far from home and, given
her natural reticence, this may have reinforced her tendency to stand
back and observe.
Godfrey spent a period of time working in Mwaya on the lake shore.
In contrast, Monica spent very little of her time in the lowlands, apart
from a month in Karonga, when in a letter home to her father she complained that there was ‘no view at all’.44 Perhaps the novelty of Godfrey’s
situation meant that he could not seek familiarity in the landscape, quite
simply because there was none. It is tempting to speculate that it was this
emotional ‘distance’ that gave Godfrey the scope to range freely, both in
his intimacies with his informants, and across the landscape as he moved
from one site to another.
Godfrey’s family and educational background also shaped his orientation. He came from a literary family: his father was the Shakespearean
scholar John Dover Wilson.45 Furthermore his study in Oxford would
have included linguistics. This revealed itself both in his ability to
learn and document languages, and his analysis of ritual symbols. Seán
Morrow has described the literary content of Godfrey’s early letters to
41
42
43
44
45
Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 9.
See Chapter 2.
WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson Family Correspondence to her father (David Hunter),
Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 18 Sept. 1936, ‘off Beira, Union Castle Line’.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 3 Sept. 1937, Ilolo, near Rungwe.
John Dover Wilson taught Renaissance literature at King’s College, London and the
University of Edinburgh.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
141
Monica as ‘an engaging mixture of the imaginative, the practical and the
intellectual. He creates a fanciful dialogue between characters spun from
the work and supposed personae of the poet Robert Bridges, and Mary
Webb, the Shropshire novelist, full of mannered pre-Raphaelite images’
and suggested that Monica sometimes ‘struggles to find words to match
the wit, humour, imagination and sensuality of her husband’.46 I imagine
that Monica saw a strength that his literary skills brought to bear on his
ethnographic analysis, in particular that of ritual symbols. One feels she
had Godfrey, the son of the Shakespearean scholar, in mind when she
wrote about rainmaking and symbolism.
The rain instrument that helped the Kyungu was called Mulima. Its holes
were its eyes. If they were empty it would be empty in the sky above also,
there would be no clouds; [ . . . ] if all were full then there would be many
clouds and rain. If it were raining and he put it in a tree so that its eyes
looked up, then the sun would shine . . . If he opened its eyes that they
might be empty and put it in a tree so that it looked up then the clouds
dried up above, the sky also became empty.
The imagination of the Nyakyusa doctor who invented this magic was
near enough to that of Shakespeare to be intelligible to an Englishman.
The sun is an ‘eye’. Clouds may close it. Holes in a rain instrument are
also ‘eyes’ and if these are closed the ‘eye of heaven’ will also shut – with
clouds.47
This literary virtuosity was combined with an extraordinary linguistic
skill. When they returned together to Bunyakyusa after Godfrey’s first six
months of study, Monica was to find that he had prepared a dictionary
and grammar, which she could use to help her learn the language. This
linguistic ability gave Godfrey an extraordinary advantage – years later
when he visited Audrey Richards’s old field-site, Audrey wrote to him
that he must be ‘some kind of linguistic genius’, and he had gathered
far more information in just two months than she would have managed
when she was working there.48
Monica’s gender was to prove a disadvantage. Despite her greater
experience as an ethnographer, once she was married, her status was
diminished. There was the matter of money. She was no longer entitled
to a full fieldwork allowance from the International African Institute
(IAI) as she would have been had she followed her original plan to study
independent Churches in South Africa,49 and Godfrey was forced to
46
47
48
49
Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’, 8, 13.
Monica Wilson, Communal Rituals, 114–115.
WC, B4.7, Godfrey Wilson Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Audrey Richards/
Godfrey Wilson, 13 Dec. 1938, ‘Back on the Rand’.
Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, ‘Bunyakyusa’, Hogsback, 4
Jan. 1982, CD in Manuscripts and Archives Department, UCT Libraries, my transcription (henceforth ‘Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa’).
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write to the IAI to ask them to cover her travel and living expenses when
they went to London for a six-month break from fieldwork in 1936.
As Lyn Schumaker has noted, women anthropologists often found it
difficult to get academic positions if they were married, and one wonders
if Monica would have received any funds from the IAI at all, had she not
already established a working relationship with them.50
As a wife, Monica now had housekeeping responsibilities. She later
described a traditional division of roles in which Godfrey was oriented
towards the outer world, and she inwards towards the home.
Godfrey looked after the outside housekeeping, that is organising supplies
coming in from elsewhere. I looked after the inside housekeeping – seeing
to the cooking of the supplies that arrived. You had to be a reasonably
good housekeeper, because if you ran out of a packet of matches it meant
sending a messenger for 50 miles to buy some more matches.51
This inward and outward orientation was reflected in their fieldwork.
While Godfrey often travelled around with his tent for days at a time,
Monica seemed to have stayed closer to home, working with the clerk
Leonard Mwaisumo or walking around the village and observing women
as they went about their daily business. And as we will see, gendered
values in Bunyakyusa made it easier for Godfrey to get to know his
male informants than it was for Monica to become close to her female
informants.
Despite these differences, there were important values that Monica
and Godfrey shared. Godfrey was influenced by R. H. Tawney’s Christian sociology52 – interested in, but never becoming a Marxist or member
of the Communist Party. He developed what Richard Brown described
as a dialectical approach to functionalism: a ‘marriage of Marx and
Malinowski’.53 Monica’s upbringing at the relatively liberal Lovedale
mission in South Africa included schooling with Xhosa children, and
later her membership of the Labour Study Circle at Cambridge as
an undergraduate underwrote her sympathy towards African nationalism and labour movements.54 From his very arrival in Africa, Godfrey
showed an interest in race relations, wages and the standard of living
of migrant workers. This was no doubt influenced by Monica’s greater
experience of race relations in southern Africa, with the Lovedale mission
so firmly set against the separation of Africans from Europeans. There
were labour riots around the time of her fieldwork in East London,55
50
51
52
53
54
55
Lyn Schumaker, ‘Women in the Field in the Twentieth Century: Revolution, Involution,
Devolution?’, 281.
Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa.
Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 59.
Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule’, 195.
See Chapter 1 in this volume.
See Chapter 3.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
143
and she must have discussed labour conditions and wages with Godfrey,
who recorded notes on wages and labour conditions in the mines and
townships during a short tour of South Africa before travelling up to
Bunyakyusa.56
To sum up: Monica’s familiarity with the African missionary landscape gave her a place, in contrast with Godfrey whose unfamiliarity
allowed him to move about more freely. Monica was the more experienced ethnographer, but Godfrey’s linguistic skill gave him an advantage
in language learning, often enabling him to establish close relationships
with his informants quickly. Gender roles also inhibited Monica. As a
married woman she was now more oriented towards the home and, as
we will see in the next section, it was difficult for her to find a female
role in Bunyakyusa culture that would be compatible with the role of a
researcher. Certainly Monica does not seem to have produced as rich an
archive of fieldnotes as Godfrey, whose Nyakyusa notebooks are full of
the most intimate and revealing conversations.
Mwaipaja and Kagile: A Participant and an Observer
Anthropological fieldnotes reveal more than simply the data that are
recorded during fieldwork. They offer clues to the fieldworker’s personality and fieldwork style.57 When Godfrey and Monica arrived in
Bunyakyusa they were given Nyakyusa names by the chief Mwaipopo:
Godfrey was named Mwaipaja, and Monica was Kagile.58 This signified
a shift in identity from their British and South African origins to one
with a ‘Nyakyusa’ inflection. Through a close reading of their fieldnotes
and letters, we get a picture of the landscape they inhabited, the various personalities with whom they engaged, and the emergence of their
very different fieldwork styles as ‘Godfrey’ and ‘Monica’ brought their
differences in background, gender and personality to Bunyakyusa and its
inhabitants. As they became part of the Nyakyusa local scene, Mwaipaja
and Kagile emerged as complementary fieldworkers, with Mwaipaja the
sociable participant and Kagile the more reserved observer.
Between them they spent four years in the field, from August 1934
to January 1938. Megan Vaughan has described this region of Tanganyika as a ‘colonial fantasy land’. The lush green highland landscape was
easily reshaped to European tastes, it could be ‘Scotland, Chamonix,
Ireland’,59 and in the administrative centre Tukuyu one could live in
56
57
58
59
WC, A1.5, Godfrey Wilson, Personal Papers, ‘African Diary 1934–1935’.
Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research
at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in Handler, ed., Significant Others, 91–130.
It is not clear from the genealogies in the fieldnotes who Mwaipaja was. Kagile was
Mwaipopo’s paternal aunt (Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa).
Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 3.
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a stone cottage with rosebushes on the lawn. The highland scene was
dotted with European personalities such as the district officer Mr P. M.
Huggins and his wife, Mr Eustice of the Tanganyika Agricultural Department, the Reverend and Mrs Marx of the Lutheran mission at Rungwe,
and the officers of the King’s African Rifles in Masoko.60 From their base
in Ilolo, Monica and Godfrey were able to spend weekends in Tukuyu,
playing tennis and attending social events with Major Wells, a former district officer, and Mrs Wells, who kept a rest house and coffee plantation
in Tukuyu.61
Godfrey had arrived in Bunyakyusa six months before Monica, setting
things up, learning the language and preparing a vocabulary and grammar. He spent most of this time down in Mwaya on the lake shore. In
February 1935 he travelled down to Hogsback, where they were married, returning to Bunyakyusa together in March. They spent the next
six months mainly in Isumba (Selya), after which there was a five-month
break in London, allowing them to write up and reflect on fieldnotes,
for Godfrey to present papers at Malinowski’s seminars at the London
School of Economics,62 and for Monica to work on the proofs of Reaction to Conquest. On their final return they resumed a period of intense
research, and travelled to several different sites. There were two long
stints in the highlands, in Ilolo near the Rungwe mission where they
spent six months (September 1936 to February 1937), and five months
back in Isumba (February to May 1937) where Godfrey worked on ritual
with the rainmaker Kasitile. In early December 1936, Monica was invalided out of the field with malaria for six months, returning only in June
1937.63
Godfrey and Monica spent their last six months in the field moving
around the country. They spent the month of June in the Lupa goldfields in Chunya, and moved from there to Karonga across the border of
northern Nyasaland. From there they split up: Monica travelled to the
Livingstonia mission and Godfrey returned to Rungwe. Godfrey then
made a month-long trip down to Kilwa in the lake plain, where he visited
the chief Korosso and then went by canoe to the Pali Kyala cave in the
60
61
62
63
Monica Wilson, Good Company, viii–ix.
WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 23 Oct. 1936, ‘Near Rungwe’; Monica
Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa; Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 4.
WC, C1 Malinowski seminars: notes on/papers presented for. The titles of his papers
give a clear sense of his deep interest in the theoretical and methodological issues at the
heart of Malinowski’s functionalist approach: ‘The function of law’ (10 March 1936),
‘Ten elements of social life: a suggested guide to research in the field’ (17 June 1936);
‘The nature of an institution’; ‘Paper defining various concepts: religion, religious and
magical symbolism etc., necessary for an understanding of the connection between
religion and society’.
Monica must have travelled down towards the lake at some point or she would not have
caught malaria. The highlands are far too cold and wet for malaria to be transmitted.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
145
north-east corner of the lake to investigate ritual. They ended with a final
stop in Isumba.
In an interview with Francis and Lindy Wilson in 1982, Monica
described how she first flew to Bunyakyusa with Godfrey, from Johannesburg to Lusaka and then on to Mbeya in a ‘small aeroplane that bumped
around the countryside’. From here they travelled over the pass at 2,400
metres to Tukuyu in an ‘Indian-owned truck’, which ‘slithered and skidded over the hills’. After resting in the guesthouse kept by Mrs Wells,
they went by ‘foot safari’ for 24 kilometres to Masoko, the base camp
for the King’s African Rifles station, where they spent the night. Megan
Vaughan has described how at that time Europeans were often carried
in ‘hammock-like devices, up and down the steep mountain ridges’, and
of Monica’s relief that ‘she was fit and could walk because “it would be
dreadful to be large and fat and have to be carried”’.64 Later, perhaps
because her six months’ recovery from malaria had returned her to the
field with warnings from her physician to take great care of her health,
she was happy to be carried when she travelled to Karonga.
My mode of transport here is a ‘bush car’ – a cross between a bath chair and
a rickshaw pulled by one man and pushed by another. Quite comfortable
and very efficient in flat country tho’ useless in the hills and when crossing
rivers. The Faulds most kindly lent us one of theirs for the time we are
about Karonga. It’s much lighter on carriers than a machilla and so I much
prefer it – also one sees more than when lying in a hammock.65
This was a far cry from Monica’s first journey through Bunyakyusa.
Monica remembered the extra 24 kilometres on foot from Masoko to
Isumba, where Godfrey had established their household before leaving
at the end of January 1935. With them were 20 porters, each with an
18-kilogram package. The heaviest items – sheets and notebooks – had
been divided up to distribute the load evenly. And what did those packs
contain? Godfrey itemised them in his notebook when they moved on to
Rungwe:
1–3 Table and Chairs; 4–6 Bed and bed rests; 7–9 Tent; 10–14, 16, 19–
22 (M’s) Tin boxes; 15 Cartridges; 18 Medicines; 23 Box books; 25 Box
(gramophone); 27–29 Cook’s box; 31–32, 37 Mats; 33 Pails; 34 Lantern;
35 Cameras; 36 Waterbottles; 38 Typewriter.66
In Isumba she was greeted by her new household – Alidi the cook,
Leonard the clerk and Kabiki the houseman.67 A feast was prepared by
the chief Mwaipopo’s wives, where Monica tasted the local beer for the
64
65
66
67
Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 9.
WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 10 Aug. 1937, Karonga mission.
WC, D1.1, Nyakyusa Research, Godfrey Wilson’s Notebooks, Notebook 32.
Monica Wilson, Good Company, viii.
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Figure 4.4. Inside the small house at Isumba that was their ‘principal headquarters’. Godfrey Wilson gave a brief account of its history: ‘Here in 1913 the Berlin
Mission began a hospital station and completed one house before the outbreak
of war. Then the work had to be abandoned . . . In this house, three miles from
our single neighbour, we spent eight months in all, at various times.’68
first time: ‘the only criticism was that they said the level of beer didn’t
go down when I sucked through my straw’. Her new home was a small
brick house, abandoned during the First World War, which Godfrey had
renovated for the sum of £10. It was close to the village, just 45 metres
from the ‘native gardens’. The house (see Figure 4.4) must have had at
least two rooms, with one bedroom facing over the Rift Valley.
The sun rises are magnificent – every morning the whole sky over Nyasa
and behind the Livingstones is ablaze. I sit up in bed and watch it. I hear
Godfrey next door wrestling with the law governing the property rights of
men and women . . . It takes time to work out all the details and check them
and find how custom differs in pagan and Christian families.69
Monica was to work very closely with Leonard Mwaisumo in Isumba.
As Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and Andrew Bank describe in
Chapter 5 of this book, she depended on him as her teacher, interpreter
and fellow researcher. No doubt he helped her get to grips with the
voluminous notes on language that he and Godfrey had prepared. Isumba
68
69
Godfrey Wilson draft book on Nyakyusa society (WC D8.5) cited in Rui C. de N.
Assubuji, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Monica Hunter Wilson’s Photographs in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa, 1931–1938’ (unpublished MA thesis, University
of the Western Cape, 2010), 65.
WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 3 Dec. 1937, [Isumba].
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
147
was where Godfrey established his closest relationships, in particular with
Kasitile the rainmaker, and they had a ‘constant stream’ of visitors at their
house for tea and shared meals.
The other important site for their research, and for Monica in particular, was Ilolo at the Rungwe Moravian mission. This was at a much
higher altitude. When they first arrived they must have stayed in a tent,
as a notebook entry records a ‘Discussion between chief and 2 friends
(stimulated by the sight of Kabiki and co. putting the fly on the tent)
on the subject of “European times”)’.70 They found a more permanent
residence ‘in the main thoroughfare of the village’ in a Nyakyusa-style
house.71 Inside such a house there are normally three rooms: a ‘living
room’ where a family eat at night and in winter, and two bedrooms to
one side.
One imagines that when Monica arrived, the domestic arrangements
became more organised. There were no longer any entries in Godfrey’s
notebooks about hunting for meat, or struggling to buy food from neighbours who were used only to exchanging it as gifts (upon which he could
not rely for regular meals). As Monica recalled in her interview with
Francis and Lindy Wilson, they kept hens and employed a messenger
who went out to buy meat at the market at Tukuyu, vegetables from
the missions, oranges from the lake shore, and wheat grown on top of
the Livingstone Mountains that ‘was ground between two stones and
we baked our own bread’. They bought honey and small quantities of
coffee which, as Monica remembered, ‘was roasted and ground in the
household and we had the most marvellous fragrant coffee to use’. Since
Godfrey was often away during the day, and occasionally overnight, Monica had to learn the basics of Kinyakyusa fast, because ‘the cook couldn’t
take orders from the clerk [and she had] to order the dinner’.72
Monica’s arrival signalled the resumption of intense fieldwork and the
production of reams of fieldnotes. Reading through the notes, the influence of differences described in the previous section – in their training
in anthropological methods, personality and gender – emerge unmistakably. Monica’s Cambridge training with Driberg and Hodson had
oriented her towards an observation method. Godfrey entered the field
fully informed by Malinowski’s method. Famously, Malinowski advocated leaving the verandah and living like ‘the natives’ and yet was, to
say the least, ambiguous about the process.73 Godfrey was able to come
70
71
72
73
WC, D1.1, Notebook 33, 40.
Monica Wilson, Good Company, vii.
Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa.
Malinowski’s diaries famously shocked anthropologists for they revealed much of his
distaste for the Trobrianders, contradicting his advice to live like the ‘natives’. Bronislaw
M. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. N. Guterman (London,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).
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much closer to his teacher’s ‘mythic’ character.74 His notebooks give
the overwhelming impression of a man who quickly slipped into local
social life. His life was full of beer parties, sharing meals and confidences with other men. He did not need to compensate his informants for
their conversation with tobacco as did Malinowski with the Trobrianders,
or Evans-Pritchard with the Nuer, and indeed as Monica had done in
Pondoland.75 This male world of ‘Good Company’, however, was not so
easily accessible for Monica. She clearly found it much more difficult to
gain entry to Nyakyusa women’s social lives.
Without a ‘natural’ social space for herself, she seems to have spent a lot
of her time with Leonard Mwaisumo ‘the clerk’, and gravitated towards
more educated men and women around the missions. She ‘didn’t much
like the beer which was made like tea with hot water’. Beerdrinking,
which was such a central part of male social activity, became one of the
obstacles that excluded her from many of Godfrey’s networks. In a brief
revealing note in her ‘Economic Calendar’ she wrote, ‘April 4th. Beer
at Mwaihojo’s. 8 men and me present. Evening. Drums going at two
places: singing at a third’. That she felt out of place is evident in the ‘8
men and me’ comment. The brevity of this note is also revealing, given
that Godfrey devoted six pages to the same event.76 As she explained,
the women and men led very separate lives and it wasn’t easy for a woman
to mix with a man who wasn’t part of her family and it became quite clear
that it would be much more efficient for me to do most of my fieldwork
among the women and Godfrey to do the greater part of the fieldwork
among the men.77
This division of labour was not to be as convenient for Monica as for
Godfrey. She complained that the Nyakyusa women were difficult to
work with, because ‘they found it difficult to give an account of their
customs’.78 Her description of Nyakyusa women is contradicted by the
contemporary Tanzanian stereotype of them as strong-willed and ‘difficult’ for husbands to manage, but in the 1930s Monica was dismayed
to find that they had little or no interest in politics (unlike women in
Pondoland) and little autonomy. Furthermore, they were extremely subservient to men and would not speak in their presence.79 That being
74
75
76
77
78
79
George W. Stocking, Jnr, ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
Ibid., 102; Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1940), 12–13; Chapter 2 in this volume.
WC, D1.1, Notebook 16, 2–4; 15–17.
Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa.
Monica Wilson, Good Company, ix.
Since the fieldnotes are full of stories of women running away from their husbands and
taking lovers, it is tempting to imagine there was another side to the image that Monica
drew of Nyakyusa women.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
149
so, Monica could not possibly have performed the gender role of a
Nyakyusa woman; she even ‘spoke Kinyakyusa like a man’ and it is plain
to see that many women found it awkward to speak in her presence. Her
main female Nyakyusa friend was ‘Maria the elder’, a literate Christian
woman who used to travel widely proselytising for the Moravian Church.
This must also have contributed to the difference in data that Monica
gathered, with a greater emphasis on observation than on conversational
familiarity.
Putting these differences in orientation aside, there is rarely any hint
in the archives that either Godfrey or Monica had such violent extremes
of feeling towards the locals as did Malinowski. There are but a couple
of exceptions, as in The Analysis of Social Change80 where they describe
six days’ worth of drumming for a death ritual. They wrote that ‘to
us the monotony became intolerable. By the end of the week we were
remembering jobs that had to be done outside the village!’ And again on
New Year’s Day in 1937, they are awakened in the night by a ‘[f]oul noise
outside – drums and shouting’; but such complaints are rare.81 Johannes
Fabian has written about Europeans’ objections to African music and
‘refusal to join the dance’, noting that such forms of ‘abstinence’ and
‘refusals of ecstatic experience’ can be construed as a kind of hygiene.82
Perhaps the drumming took participation a step too far for Monica and
Godfrey’s Christian faith. In any case, the Wilsons had brought with
them their own music to enjoy: ‘22 gramophone records packed among
the clothes (all used) . . . 1 phonograph for recording Native songs, and
50 wax rolls for records in 2 wooden boxes.’83 This, as Monica was to
record in a fieldnote, was to give their friends a glimpse into the world of
Europeans, along with the desirable luxuries of evening dress and tennis
so easily available to the Wilsons.
Servants came in after supper saying: ‘People are talking about the gramophone here and we have not heard it.’ Two classical records played. Kabiki
and Alidi began to discuss European ukumoga [dance]. Relate[d] to the
admiring Timothe and Donald. Kabiki always let’s [sic] drop casually in
80
81
82
83
The Wilsons wrote the book to advise amateur anthropologists. These included other
interested Europeans such as missionaries, colonial officials, farmers, housewives, all of
whom has a vested interest in understanding local African cultures, and might be drawn
in more systematically to the project of applied anthropology.
Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change, 85–86; WC, D1.1,
Notebook 45, 1 Jan. 1937.
Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central
Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press,
2000), 109–118.
WC, A1.15, Personal Papers, Godfrey Wilson: Invoices, correspondence re goods
ordered, receipts etc, 1936–1944, ‘Customs Declaration’ of goods taken to Livingstone from Bunyakyusa, 1938. There are, sadly, no surviving records of recordings on
these wax cylinders.
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every conversation the fact that he has been to Cape Town. Very much man
of the world. He mimics Europeans dancing and dance band[s] . . . Alidi
tells of fancy dress, of tennis by night in Mombassa [sic], of fancy dress
at which Major Wells appeared as an Ngoni warrior. Timothe and Donald agape. Kabiki ‘Tukuyu is just the back veld compared to Cape Town.’
Admiring comments on dance floors (ndisu) [lawn] and E. dress clothes.
‘Even if Mwaipaja dressed up in dress clothes you would not know him.’84
We get a glimpse of their daily notetaking practice in ‘The Study of
African Society’. The emphasis there was on ‘facts’, best recorded as
near as possible to the place where they were produced.
Whenever possible notes should be made during a ceremony or during
conversation with an informant. We ourselves often find it possible to take
down long statements at the time they are made, when friends go slowly for
us and pause while we write. Otherwise rough notes made at the time can
be written up the same evening. And as far as possible statements should
be taken down in the vernacular. They will ultimately have to be translated,
but hasty translation inevitably means the loss of fine shades of meaning.85
The fieldnotes clearly illustrate their different styles. Godfrey’s notebooks are mostly much easier than Monica’s fieldnotes to mine for clues
to the ‘story’ of their fieldwork. In addition to his ‘African Diary’, which
he abandoned after Monica joined him in the field, there are 78 notebooks in all – numbered from 1 to 79 (12 is missing, apparently lost
when he went to South Africa to get married).86 They are chronological, which immediately makes them more useful than Monica’s folders
(ordered retrospectively by subject) for piecing together the sequence of
events. Godfrey’s impossible handwriting, however, means that anyone
working with them must make slow progress, although they are easier to
read when he wrote in Kinyakyusa and took greater care.87 Sometimes
Monica’s presence softly insinuates itself, with lightly pencilled ‘translations’ above indecipherable squiggles and scrawls.
The notebooks are roughly A5 in size and reporter style, bound at
the top. Godfrey would flip each page over, writing on only one side,
which helpfully gave him space to add additional notes on the blank
sides, perhaps when discussing the day’s events with Leonard or one
of the other clerks. These extra notes often include new vocabulary,
84
85
86
87
WC, D4.2, Christian Amusements, dated 16 March [1935]. Thanks to Andrew Bank
for the note from the archive.
Godfrey Wilson and Monica Hunter, ‘The Study of African Society’, 15.
Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa.
A colleague looking over my shoulder asked if they were written in Arabic! Godfrey’s
correspondents clearly shared this problem – in response to a fieldwork report, Malinowski complained, ‘I was able to decipher it not without some assistance from my staff
of secretaries but at the end everything became clear, clean and transparent’ (WC, B4.4,
B.M. Malinowski/Godfrey Wilson, [London], 20 Jan. 1935).
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
151
additional explanations, or information he had forgotten to record. The
notebooks are numbered on the outer cover, usually with the date and
place as well. Some, although not all, are indexed, and most of them have
the page numbers written in by hand. Reading through them, different
‘scenes of writing’ as Clifford puts it, begin to distinguish themselves:
most notably language learning; transcription of information dictated by
informants; and inscription, when Godfrey turns from a social event and
makes a note about the occasion.88 Less frequent are scenes of ‘thick
description’, where Godfrey turns away from the field-site and reflects
on his data. There are some notes recording reflective conversations with
his informants, notably Leonard Mwaisumo, and there must have been
discussions with Monica, but these are not recorded.
Notes on language are prominent at the start of Godfrey’s fieldwork,
and we can imagine Leonard and Godfrey working together through
vocabulary and practising grammatical constructions. To begin with he
writes out new vocabulary and sentences using the phonetic alphabet,89
but as he becomes more proficient he slips between this and use of other
standardised symbols. Monica, arriving to find Godfrey’s dictionary and
grammar already prepared for her, also used phonetic notation intermittently. Lists of new words are grouped in subject areas – parts of the
body, animals, kinds of food – and there are lists of verbs, which are
conjugated in example sentences. Although language learning dominates
Godfrey’s first four notebooks, it continues to punctuate his later entries
as he moves into a new area of inquiry or discovers another interesting
grammatical point.
The scale of his endeavour to command basic Kinyakyusa in the first
month is occasionally revealed in lessons where he learns phrases such as
‘kisita kwi jola ukimana okokaba – without endeavour you cannot gain’90
and when he is learning to conjugate the verb ukufwan’a (to satisfy,
or to comfort): ‘gafuan’aga lenga naman’ilaga amasyo gaga – I would
be satisfied if I could learn these words’.91 His determination to learn
Kinyakyusa and frustration at the process shows up in Notebook 4:
‘fikuti mman’ilege panandi mbusiku bosa – I must learn a little each
day . . . naliganile ukuman’ila ikinyakyusa mbebembebe – I wish I could
learn Kinyakyusa faster’.92
88
89
90
91
92
James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’ in Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: The Making of
Anthropology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 50. Leslie J.
Bank expands on Clifford’s ‘scenes of writing’ in Chapter 3 of this volume.
The advantage of the phonetic alphabet is that words are spelt according to the spoken
sound, making it easier for a beginner to remember the correct pronunciation.
Usually spelt ukukaba, but here Godfrey has substituted ‘o’ for ‘u’ in his use of the
phonetic alphabet.
WC, D1.1, Notebook 2, 12.
Ibid., Notebook 4.
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With language mastered, his fieldnotes richly combine transcriptions
of narratives told by informants: complex genealogies, origin myths, tales
of battles and explanations of custom. The final batch of fieldnotes are
dominated by Kasitile, Godfrey’s main source on ‘pagan’ ritual. Interwoven with these transcribed pieces are other items that are much more
revelatory of Godfrey’s place in the field setting, and of the social scene
generally. These include diagrams, lists of participants at an event, short
descriptions of emotions demonstrated by participants, and the occasional reference to material culture. These inscriptions often turn into
transcriptions, in particular when visitors arrive in the evening or he goes
to a beer drink. Conversations are recorded seemingly verbatim. These
notes offer fascinating clues to the personalities of his almost exclusively male friends and informants, their personal troubles and conflicts,
opinions on political change, and troubling moral issues of the time.
Sometimes they slip into petitioning, and it becomes clear that people
come to Godfrey hoping he will be able to intervene in some way, perhaps by putting in a word with Major Wells or some other influential
European.93
Andrew Bank has noted the influence of Godfrey’s father, the
Shakespearean scholar, in these notes,94 which are often composed like
a scene from a play. New entries begin with a cast list, followed by dialogue in the form of direct quotations, complete with stage directions –
‘enter’, ‘exit’. Monica picks up this device in the chapter on Kasitile in
Communal Rituals, listing the cast ‘dramatis personae’ and then scripting
conversation between Godfrey and Kasitile as characters in a play.
In contrast, Monica’s notes are much less verbal, more observational.95
She did not use notebooks but instead wrote on slips of paper that were
later cut and filed into different folders under headings. This was a common mode of notetaking at the time because it lent itself so easily to later
data analysis through ‘cut and paste’ techniques,96 although it must often
have been unwieldy – it is easy to imagine loose pieces of paper being
blown around in the wind of Bunyakyusa. Unlike Godfrey’s notes, not
all of Monica’s are in longhand; many are typewritten and organised into
tables and lists. It is in this way that Godfrey’s notes made their way into
Monica’s own folders, as she typed them up, also on separate sheets of
paper, and reorganised them alongside her own, under subject headings.
Thus we can imagine Monica as a relatively quiet figure watching and
listening in Bunyakyusa, less gregarious than her husband. There is a
93
94
95
96
Missionaries were also petitioned in this way; see Charsley, The Princes of Nyakyusa and
Wright, German Missions.
Andrew Bank, personal communication.
This assessment is based on a very selective reading, as I have not read through all
Monica’s folders as I have Godfrey’s fieldnotes.
A. F. Robertson, personal communication.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
153
Figure 4.5. Monica observing Nyakyusa girls washing clothes at the river.97 This
is most likely a scene dating to a September 1936 visit to a school which Megan
Vaughan describes. ‘Monica went with the girls to the river where they pounded
and scrubbed the boiled clothes and laid them out to dry. They took off the
clothes they were wearing and washed them too with the school soap, and then
washed themselves. The bathing took an hour and then they returned to the
school, hung up their clothes to dry and sat down to eat the food they had all
brought from their homes.’98
sense of anonymity in her notes. Godfrey usually knew the names of the
people who appear in his notebooks, but Monica had a narrower range of
informants who were also acquaintances. In an extract from September
1936, shortly after they returned from their break in London, we see that
she spent the morning walking around Ilolo village to see what women
were doing.
Maria [the church elder] just come in from service 8am (sun rose 7am)
Abombile already gone to forest to get poles for building ikibaga [hut].
4 boys and 2 girls at home eating potatoes with mother.
Mother goes off to fetch firewood.
97
98
WC, N11 Negatives of photographs taken in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa.
Megan Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and others in south-west Tanganyika’, 13–14.
Leonard Mwaisumo accompanied her on this school visit and it is therefore likely
that he was the photographer.
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Next house, no adults
One woman gone early to work w Marx [the Reverend Marx at the
Lutheran mission].
Next house
Man gone kumatapwa mmatengela [to get firewood]
Woman gone to work in fields
Next house
Man hoeing maize w two friends
Wife preparing food to take to men. porridge. Eat a little herself, gives
a little to child, leaves porridge telling child it is for her later in day.
Next house
Woman away planting maize
Man mending stockings
Next house
Woman going off w hollow tree trunk to leave in forest for bees.
Next house
woman gone for firewood.
Many children at home. Girls up to c 10 years with babies.
There is a feeling of distance and impersonality to these notes. In a similar
household survey, in Mwaya, Godfrey walks around the village and asks
for all the names of those he talks to, and the others in the household as
well. Monica is more interested in everyday activities: collecting firewood,
making porridge, caring for babies, hoeing maize, mending stockings,
and collecting bamboo poles for building. In other instances, Leonard
Mwaisumo (‘L.’ in the notes) accompanies her. By now an experienced
research assistant, he comments and instructs Monica on what she sees.
Women’s work. April 30th [1935]
Wife of [the chief] Mwaihojo making door of a hut, – c 2” thick, mud
and dung. Pattern made with finger nails, mealy cob, or serrated piece of
banana stalk.
She has already filled the loft with very thick logs of wood – ornament
and to use in emergency. Will make a work party to mud walls, – call her
women friends.
L. Making floor will take 3 to 4 days according to other work woman has to
do. Will last 6 months, perhaps a year if very well done. – Not resmeared –
only fill up cracks if they appear (N.B. floors seen all been damp.)
Walls remudded several times during first three weeks, to fill up cracks –
after that all right.99
The folder on ‘Family Economics’ has many such fragments. The overarching sense is that Leonard is there with her much of the time, pointing
99
WC, D5.1, Family Economics.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
155
things out, talking and explaining as perhaps two women (Monica and
Mwaihojo’s wife) stand by and listen.
Godfrey’s rapid entry into Nyakyusa society in Rungwe and the great
intimacy he developed so quickly with his informants must surely be
linked to his ability to learn Kinyakyusa. Monica was later to single out
his linguistic ability100 and her knowledge of plants and gardening as
a key difference in their fieldwork styles. Godfrey noticed grammatical
constructions when people spoke,101 eventually identifying almost forty
different tenses, and she noticed what was growing in the fields.
July 14th. Saw castor oil plants w small berries growing near Mwaihojo’s.
Small boy said they enyemba. Wild, but a variety w larger berry introduced
by Europeans is planted.
Banana grove of man who moved within the last year, almost disappeared.
July 22nd. A few maize and beans near Rungwe but do not look so healthy –
not nearly so many as in Selya. One small lot of maize in flower. Bananas
scantier than in Selya. Much more rank grass than in Selya.
Impression country much less heavily stocked.
In Selya signs of erosion on hillsides. Probably due to non-contoured cultivation. Near Rungwe tree w red flowers like umsinisi in full bloom.
In fields seen dry manure sprinkled on ridges. L says this done to keep
cattle from straying on to them.102
‘A Sacred Trust and a Labour of Love’
Following Godfrey’s sudden death it fell to Monica to write up the
product of their fieldwork. They had always planned to work on this
together, and it seems that she continued in this spirit. This was to prove
a lifetime’s work, and one which paid more tribute to Godfrey’s life than
to her own.
It is possible that Monica was unable to begin work on the Nyakyusa
monographs until she was established as a lecturer at Fort Hare Native
College, some ten years after she left Bunyakyusa. She makes reference to
this project in a letter to Audrey Richards in which her struggle to keep up
100
101
102
When Godfrey started to learn ChiBemba for his work at the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute, Audrey Richards wrote, ‘I think you must be a linguistic genius like Fortune,
or I hope not so much like him. You probably beat me in Cibemba now, apart from
having a more accurate ear and knowing when nouns are in the locative (I never knew
there was a locative. Yes I suppose I did but kutontonkayaye!)’ (WC, B4.7, Audrey
Richards/Godfrey Wilson, 13 Dec. 1938, ‘Back on the Rand’). By this stage he had
been in Northern Rhodesia for ten months.
Morrow, ‘This Is from the Firm’; Monica Wilson interview, Bunyakyusa.
WC, D5.1, Family Economics.
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with the Nyakyusa writing becomes apparent, given her other responsibilities in teaching and administration.103 In 1946 she confided to Audrey
that ‘I’ve been feeling depressed about my Nyakyusa work, for administrative jobs are swallowing a shocking amount of my time and I long
to be getting on with Nyakyusa villages. Also I’ve been working slowly.
“Leisure to write” looks like a will o’ the wisp always a year ahead.’104
It is clear from their plans that she and Godfrey intended to write up
the Nyakyusa material together.105 Although the first articles came out
as single-authored pieces, once they had left Bunyakyusa for the RLI
co-authorship became increasingly important as their mode of writing.
In 1939 Monica wrote to her father that ‘Godfrey is very anxious we
should write together’.106 Until then Godfrey had been responsible for
what Monica saw as the most ‘significant’ publications on the Nyakyusa,
addressing age-villages, law, morality (witchcraft and magic) and politics.
Indeed, ‘An African Christian Morality’ was the only Nyakyusa publication that Monica authored during this period. Her article addressed
the changes to Nyakyusa values that conversion to Christianity had
brought, including the shift from polygyny to monogamy, the effects
of belief in Heaven and Hell in contrast to the ‘pagan’ beliefs in the
ancestral lands of the ‘shades’, and the attribution of powers of the
Nyakyusa curse ekegune to missionaries, Church officials and God.
Her material is modestly framed although it does anticipate her and
Godfrey’s later interests in social change, and it contrasts with many
of her contemporaries who wrote in the ethnographic present. There
are a few clues in the footnotes that she considered this piece as
secondary to Godfrey’s publications: a note in the bibliography of Good
Company does not include it among ‘the more substantial accounts of
Nyakyusa-Ngonde people’;107 and a note in the article itself states that
her work is framed by pieces already published by Godfrey, adding:
‘This article is complementary to these and is not fully intelligible apart
from them.’108 In other publications, key findings are also attributed
to Godfrey: in ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’ she writes, ‘It [organisation
into age-villages] had not been noticed among the Nyakyusa before my
husband went there’ (my emphasis).109
While Godfrey was alive, Monica continued to publish under her
maiden name, Hunter, but after his death she changed to Wilson, even
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
This period is addressed by Seán Morrow in Chapter 6 of this volume.
WC, B6.14, Letters to and from Audrey Richards, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards,
14 Sept. 1946.
Monica Wilson, Good Company, ix.
WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, [Livingstone], 24 Feb. 1939.
Monica Wilson, Good Company, 276.
Hunter, ‘An African Christian Morality’, 266, footnote 1.
Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, 24.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
157
revising this in later bibliographies. Thus, ‘An African Christian Morality’
was attributed to Monica Hunter when it was originally published in
Africa, but to Monica Wilson in the bibliography of Good Company.110
This shows a conscious decision to move from Hunter – by which she
was already known for her Pondoland work – and an independent writing
identity, to Wilson, the name signifying them as a couple who continued
to produce together after Godfrey’s death.
In 1940, when they were working on The Analysis of Social Change,
Monica wrote to Audrey Richards, ‘I divide my time between Francis
[Monica’s first son, born in Livingstone in 1939] and this theoretical
stuff. Having something so very concrete as Francis to play with seems
to make me somehow more capable of excursions in the air. Anyway I
can’t get on properly with Nyakyusa writing until we’ve got the theory a
bit clearer – fatal to contradict one’s husband’s pronouncements!’111 Her
rather wry comment about her husband is good-humoured, with a sense
that she was having to rein in some of Godfrey’s theoretical ideas. A new
complementarity was developing, as Monica was pursuing the ‘facts’, to
keep Godfrey’s ideas in check.
I imagine Monica working in her study in the garden in Hogsback,
transcribing Godfrey’s notes, working with material from these relatively
untroubled years that they spent together, with Godfrey’s chair close by.
She must have gained considerable comfort from reliving that period.
Rereading fieldnotes can be a highly evocative experience, bringing you
straight back to a moment in the field; you can hear the voices and see the
facial expressions of the people present, picture the scene, the weather,
the aromas, and recall the emotions and atmosphere of a particular event.
It is therefore difficult to imagine anything other than that these 78
notebooks were a way of keeping in touch with Godfrey after his death. As
her colleague and longtime friend, the anthropologist David HammondTooke, commented:
The two books on ritual reflected Monica’s deep interest in religion. She
was a committed Christian with a profound sense of the existence of an
after-life . . . It was clear she felt Godfrey’s presence continually with her
and that she regarded the writing up and publishing of the material they
gathered together as a sacred trust and a labour of love.112
It is clear from letters she wrote towards the end of her life that she
viewed the publication of his work as a kind of memorial, as well as an
obligation. Her efforts to publish the Kinyakyusa dictionary express her
110
111
112
‘The Study of African Society’ was also attributed to Godfrey Wilson and Monica
Hunter.
WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, [Livingstone], 29 April 1940.
Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 82–83.
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loyalty to the last remnants of Godfrey’s data. As she put it, 37 years after
his death, ‘I felt I owed it to Godfrey to get splendid material out.’113
Given her considerable responsibilities at Fort Hare, we must acknowledge the extraordinary task that Monica undertook in trying to ‘get
[Godfrey’s work] out’. They had carried out a significant proportion of
the fieldwork together. True, Godfrey had also spent a lot of time alone
in the field, either when Monica was in South Africa or when he went off
to work by himself, sometimes overnight. Yet Monica was able to bring to
the writing her own fieldwork experience, her knowledge of Kinyakyusa,
and familiarity with Godfrey’s interpretations and analyses from conversations in the field, letters while she was in South Africa, and afterwards
when they were together at the RLI.
One of the first tasks that Monica must have taken on was typing up
all Godfrey’s 78 surviving notebooks. Assuming she was a fast typist
and worked solidly, she could have typed up one notebook a day, which
over a normal working week would have taken her about three months to
do.114 With her other responsibilities – the children, her university work –
it probably took much longer. Monica had already used a typewriter
during her Pondoland work. It is tempting to connect her fondness for
her typewriter, the use of these machines by anthropologists in order to
‘turn away from the scene of action’,115 with her cooler, more detached
fieldwork style.
Transcribing fieldnotes from handwritten notes to typed sheets is a process familiar to many anthropologists. For Monica an important aspect
of this was what Clifford calls a ‘moment of ordering’. As she wrote to
her father from London in 1936, she enjoyed the process.
Getting rough notes into shape and finding out exactly what one knows and
does not know takes a great deal of hard work. I find tabulating schemes
neatly on the typewriter helps a lot and I can do duplicates (for G to have
a copy of my notes on it). I am so grateful to you for giving me a typewriter
and insisting that I learn properly!116
We can imagine that some of these tables were like those found in the
back of the monographs; – in Good Company, for example, she tabulates
five pages’ worth of characteristics of ‘Villages in Mwaipopo’s Chiefdom’
and 16 pages of ‘Misfortunes Attributed to Mystical Causes’. It is at this
stage of ordering and tabulating that an anthropologist can get a sense
of the scope of their data and draw out themes and patterns for further
analysis. Because Monica included such tables in her published work, we
113
114
115
116
WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 12 February1981 [Hogsback].
I have based this estimate on the time it took me to transcribe Godfrey’s notebooks on
a computer keyboard, but it must have taken longer on a heavy manual typewriter.
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 67.
WC, B5.1, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 26 March 1936, [London].
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
159
can also assume that she saw them as a vital source of evidence, backing
up claims in the book.
Thomas Hodson had advised Monica on the importance of collecting
case studies as a form of evidence.117 The value she attached to this
can be seen in her insistence on including almost a hundred pages of
appendices devoted to case studies at the end of Good Company, and
another 34 pages at the end of Rituals of Kinship. The case studies are
attributed mainly either to Godfrey or the ‘clerks’ Leonard Mwaisumo,
Timothy Mwanjesi and John Mwaikambo. Malinowski had emphasised
the collection of native texts, and Godfrey transcribed these directly as
informants dictated to him, or the clerks collected and wrote down case
studies themselves.
As Clifford describes, in the course of typing ‘the “facts” are selected, focused, initially interpreted, cleared up’.118 By comparing extracts
from Monica’s typewritten sheets of Godfrey’s notes with his longhand
originals, we can see how this happened. For Monica to put this vast
quantity of rich material to use, there had to be some selection and
ordering, but inevitably the immediacy of the social interaction and the
uncertainty surrounding rituals were lost in the process. We can compare
extracts from Monica’s folder ‘Death of Enesi’ and Godfrey’s account in
Notebook 17, for example.
Godfrey’s Notes
Mwakyonde placed pot with medicines in cold water on ground by door,
first drawing these lines and patterns and putting medicine fr the horn
(ilipengo) on the centre. Made Mwani. stand i/on pot for 5 minutes holds
on to roof.
Before this Mwak. prepared medicines. ‘I have about 20 ifipiki here’ all
roots and 2 kinds of spiny cactus. He cut roots up to length (2” – 3”) and
put in water. He saved other bits and had them tied up again. His assistants
there helping. First he put in a stone onto the pot (endeko then they cut up
pieces of ifipiki). Then the cactus, piercing the narrow [one] onto a spine
of the big leaf.
(M thinks L protested at this and Mwan. said quickly ‘yes we want this’
?offensive medicines?) Then he put in [pricks of medicines] fr 6 [plants] of
embondanya. Mwal. [Mwalisisile] threw his weight about a lot, especially
w Mwabelile. Mwaky. held out 1st [pl’t] to Mwan: and he took a piece
and put it in pot. Mwal. looked at him reproachfully and said he shouldn’t
have done it. Then he told Mwam. to do this always in an unintelligible
way. Mwan. and L protested ‘we don’t know this work at all, please speak
clearly.’119
117
118
119
See Chapter 1 in this collection.
Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 63.
WC, D1.1, Notebook 17, 76–77.
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Monica’s Typed Transcription
Mwakyonde placed pot with medicines in cold water on ground by door,
first drawing these lines and patterns. Put about twenty roots and twigs
into pot, mostly unrecognizable, but included spiny cactus.
We can see how Monica picks out what for her is the gist. She omits
discussions between participants on how their work should be carried
out and skips over the little controversy about whether the medicine
should be prepared at all – this short conversation being part of a much
larger one on the nature of burial and mourning that had been provoked
by the influence of Christianity.
The work of typing up Godfrey’s notes was thus more than mere
transcription. It was an important stage in Monica’s analysis, involving
the assimilation of his material, ordering and tabulating, and a process
of decision making, tidying up, discarding some material and choosing
others. The latter often had ‘used’ pencilled in the top corner of the
page, the former being tagged ‘considered’. I guess that would have been
a very personal process as well. The anthropologist Robert Smith has
described how retyping someone else’s notes is a way of appropriating
their field experience, making it your own.120 Transcribing Godfrey’s
notes will have been, through Monica’s fingers on the typewriter, a mode
of absorption, of remotely reliving his experiences and following him as
he got to know different personalities in the field, listening in to his often
very intimate conversations and tracing events as they unfolded. Coupled
with the immediacy of his writing and Monica’s own friendships with his
informants, this must have been a most evocative experience for her.
Conclusion
The Nyakyusa trilogy was written by Monica for Godfrey. In it she foregrounded his richer field material while minimising her own. This was
perhaps at the expense of the analytical direction in which their partnership had been heading – the books emphasise the ethnographic present,
and social change is added on almost as an afterthought.
Reading the trilogy it is easy to overlook the labour that goes into
turning fieldnotes into a written monograph. This was a work of almost
half a century spanning the period 1934 to 1982. And yet it was work
that was poignantly precious to Monica. Her time in Bunyakyusa with
Godfrey must have been among her happiest. Godfrey was in his element,
and this is reflected in his data. Monica, more reserved, complemented
120
Robert J. Smith, ‘Hearing Voices, Joining the Chorus: Appropriating Someone Else’s
Fieldnotes’ in Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes, 363–4.
Pondo Pins and Nyakyusa Hammers
161
him perfectly. Together they overcame the anthropological contradiction
within the method of participant observation.
Her work of writing up the Nyakyusa trilogy must thus have been an
exercise in nostalgia as well as an obligation she intended to honour. That
she continued to return to Godfrey’s Nyakyusa material right up until her
death in 1982 suggests that she hoped to find him in the notebooks and
her memories. The reality of this is perhaps best rendered in a passage in
a letter to Audrey Richards, who had returned some of Godfrey’s letters
to her in 1977:
His letters gave me the greatest pleasure, and also Francis and Timothy,
who said they had never read a letter from him. Those to me were too
intimate to show around, and they still hurt too much to go through. I
loved him very deeply. The letters are fun for they tell so much about
him and my mother. Yes, my mother was very beautiful, with great natural
gaiety, and she and Godfrey got on splendidly. Neither her eyes (deep blue)
nor Godfrey’s (lighter blue) have turned up again yet, but I keep hoping
they may.121
121
WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 8 Oct. 1977 [Hogsback].
5
Working with the Wilsons: The Brief Career
of a ‘Nyakyusa Clerk’ (1910–1938)
Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Timothy Mwakasekele and
Andrew Bank
Just as this book takes its general theme – ‘the interpreters’ – from Monica
Wilson’s early attention to colonial intermediaries, so this chapter follows
her interest in the ‘personal histories of native clerks’ in Central Africa.
In the opening paragraph of a draft manuscript of the study on Nyakyusa
Christians which Monica never published, she explained the origins of
her research project and the general focus of her work:
In 1933 it was suggested by the Directors of the International Institute
of African Languages and Cultures that an anthropological study should
be made of Christian missions in an African community . . . [T]he method
adopted is to describe the life of the Christian section of the community, to
compare it with the pagan section, and to analyse the differences between
them.
Her interest in ‘native clerks’, who were invariably converts, was a late
outgrowth of this. In her final quarterly report to the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (which became known as the
International African Institute (IAI)), written in October 1937, she wrote
of an ‘investigation into the histories of clerks in Government service in
Tukuyu district’, a branch of research which had possibly been prompted
by the decision of Leonard Mwaisumo, their primary research assistant,
to take up an appointment as a clerk of the highest native court, the
appeal court of senior chiefs that sat some kilometres out of Tukuyu.
Monica found that higher salaries and greater authority were the main
reasons why such an occupation was highly coveted.
Government clerkships are the best paid posts open to Africans in the
country, and both clerks in the chiefs’ courts, and the clerks in the boma,
who form as it were the ‘permanent civil service’ while district officers come
and go, have very great influence on administration. Also, a clerkship is the
only position in which a Christian commoner can share in administration
in Bunyakyusa, because one of the chief functions of a ‘great commoner’ or
councillor, is to protect the country from witches, and he must publically
[sic] drink medicines to give him power to do this.1
1
WC, D11 Correspondence with the International African Institute [henceforth IAI],
Monica Wilson’s quarterly report, n.d. [but probably Oct. 1937].
162
Working with the Wilsons
163
Her interest in ‘native clerks’, as in interpreters generally, has been taken
up in recent scholarship. In their edited volume Intermediaries, Interpreters,
and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa, Benjamin
N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts explore the
multiple and complex roles that African employees played in ways that
unsettle the old binary of collaboration and resistance, or ‘coloniser’
and ‘colonised’. Although African employees in the colonial bureaucracy
often may have occupied positions that bestowed little official authority,
the authors argue that in practice
[they] functioned, somewhat paradoxically, as the hidden linchpins of colonial rule. African colonial employees bridged the linguistic and cultural
gaps that separated European colonial officials from subject populations
by managing the collection and distribution of information, labour, and
funds. These intermediaries, who were almost without exception male,
influenced colonial rule because they shaped the interactions of subject
populations with European officials. African intermediaries did so as they
translated, mediated, and recorded those interactions. In executing their
duties as official representatives of the colonial state, these African employees consequently blurred colonial dichotomies of European and African,
white and black, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’.2
While working in the lower ranks of the colonial bureaucracy, these
African men were at the intersection of power, authority and knowledge.
At the same time that they were delivering services to their European
employers, they ‘often strategically used their influence and authority to
enhance their personal wealth, political power, and status’.3 The essays
in that volume document the life histories of African middlemen of two
generations: the intermediaries of the period of conquest from 1870 to
1918, who were able to exercise considerable influence on colonial knowledge production; and the clerks of the 1921–1952 period, who had ‘some
degree of formal, Western education’ but whose work was usually subject
to ‘more sustained supervision’.4
Monica’s interest in career trajectories, ‘personal’ (or life) ‘histories’
collected on a case study basis has also been a theme in recent African historiography. As noted in the introductory chapter to this volume, Megan
Vaughan has written about the work of Kenneth Mdala, a Nyasa clerk
who worked in Tukuyu from 1916 to 1945 and remained a staunch British loyalist while passionately promoting his Yao ethnic identity through
historical research.5 Roger Levine provides a book-length biography of
2
3
4
5
Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, 4.
Ibid., 3–36.
Ibid., 30.
Megan Vaughan, ‘Mr Mdala Writes to the Governor’, 171–189. See the Introduction in
this volume for further discussion of the edited collection referred to above, Vaughan’s
article and Levine’s biography of Jan Tzatzoe.
164
Inside African Anthropology
the life of Jan Tzatzoe, the son of a minor Xhosa chief, who imprinted
his own theological readings on Biblical texts in his work as a translator
with successive London Missionary Society missionaries on the Cape
Colony’s eastern frontier during an earlier colonial period.6
The other emerging literature on which this essay draws is that on
research assistants in the history of the social sciences in Africa, in particular, African anthropology. Although there has been a proliferation
of literature on the fieldwork experiences of European anthropologists
in colonial Africa,7 more work needs to be done on the biographies of
African research assistants who played such a pivotal role at field-sites in
translating local cultures and histories. Mostly multilingual, these assistants continued to be used by European anthropologists – as well as by
missionaries and government researchers – even after their extended stays
in Africa.8 It has become a cliché among anthropologists to give symbolic
recognition in the prefaces of their published monographs to those who
contributed to their studies. Such fleeting acknowledgments do not begin
to do justice to the key role that the assistants played in shaping cultural
knowledge, let alone allow space for substantive explorations of the identities of the interpreters and their motivations in taking up employment
as researchers.
One of us (Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi) has written about the ‘native
texts’ of African writers – here mostly schoolteachers – in the first half
of the twentieth century who recorded oral histories and ‘folklore’ of the
‘Transvaal Ndebele’ as part of the wider ethnological research project of
Nicholas van Warmelo of the Native Affairs Department in South Africa.
These richly detailed texts were recorded in the dominant local African
languages (including Northern Sotho) and fill some 11,500 manuscript
pages.9 The emphasis was on the agency of these African recorders of
folklore and oral history who, because of van Warmelo’s position as armchair ethnologist rather than anthropologist in the field, were able to
exercise a considerable degree of control and authority over the way they
chose to collect and record these materials, prompted only by the broad
6
7
8
9
Roger S. Levine, A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary,
and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 2011).
See, for example, Audrey Richards, ‘Monica Wilson: An Appreciation’, in Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological
Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings,
1975), 1–13.
James G. Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants and “Tribal” Bodies in Colonial Tanganyika’,
paper presented at the African Studies Association meeting, Chicago, 25 October 1998,
1, http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/∼ellison/bodies.html (accessed 10 January 2010).
Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, ‘“Colonial” Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and
the Making of an Archive of the “Transvaal Ndebele”, 1930–1989’, 61–80.
Working with the Wilsons
165
guidelines given in van Warmelo’s questionnaire. A reading of their data
unsettles any overly simplistic image of van Warmelo’s research project as
an ideological justification for apartheid, as this extensive cast of African
knowledge producers were able to imprint their own constructions on
the notions of tribe, custom and folklore in their work as researchers.
Lekgoathi’s essay also explores the dual status of the authors of these
vernacular texts as ‘insiders’ who had lived and grown up in the communities they were writing about, and ‘outsiders’ who had been schooled
at missionary institutions and had taken on middle-class values that set
them apart from their elderly interviewees.
This chapter takes up the themes of the production of vernacular
texts and the ambiguous insider-outsider status of the ethnological or
anthropological research assistant. These two themes are also a subject
of ongoing research by one of us (again, Lekgoathi), who is studying the
complex career of Sophonia Poonyane, Isaac Schapera’s primary research
assistant, informant and author of vernacular texts in Mochudi village in
the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1930 to 1934.10 Sophonia appears
as one of many characters in Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera by John Comaroff, Jean Comaroff and Deborah
James, a volume that brings into focus many photographs in Schapera’s
long-forgotten collection from his work in colonial Botswana.11 However, Lekgoathi’s work develops a fuller understanding of Sophonia’s
biography and personal motivations, as well as the complex relationship
and the influence he had on the white anthropologist as his ‘cultural
commuter’.12 This it has in common with our current chapter.
Where Elias Sethosa, C. M. Mokgohlwe and others emerge as authors
but not as full personalities in Lekgoathi’s earlier research,13 Leonard
Mwaisumo’s life story is of as much interest here as his dynamic work as a
research assistant to the Wilsons. He was in this position from September
1934, when he was first employed by Godfrey as his language tutor, until
November 1935, when he left to take up a position as a government clerk
near Tukuyu. He has been chosen as our biographical subject because he
recorded some seven hundred pages of vernacular text which, translated
by one of us (Timothy Mwakasekele), can be read alongside the wealth
of detailed information about him in the notebooks and African diary
10
11
12
13
Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, ‘Sophonia Poonyane and the Researches of Isaac Schapera
in Colonial Botswana’, paper presented at the African Studies Association of the United
Kingdom Biennial Conference, University of Oxford, September 2010.
Comaroff, John L., Jean Comaroff and Deborah James, eds, Picturing a Colonial Past:
The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007),
110, Plate 3.11.
Lekgoathi, ‘Sophonia Poonyane’.
Lekgoathi, ‘Colonial Experts’.
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Inside African Anthropology
of Godfrey Wilson and, to a lesser extent, in the fieldnotes and field
reports of Monica Wilson. The record here is much richer than that on
the Wilsons’ other primary research assistant in Bunyakyusa, John Brown
Mwaikambo, both because Leonard Mwaisumo was involved in a more
formative stage of learning about language and culture, and also because
(the notebooks suggest) he was a much more assertive personality and
presence in their fieldwork.
Leonard Mwaisumo’s Early Years, 1910–1933
Glimpses into Leonard’s early life are captured in an important biographical text that he wrote in January 1935, five months after taking
up employment as Godfrey Wilson’s research assistant. Godfrey was
preparing to leave the field in late January to get married in South Africa
and now, for the first time, encouraged his research assistant to record
information in Kinyakyusa while he was away. Godfrey provided Leonard
with one of the standard notebooks he had been using for his own record.
From this notebook labelled ‘L1’, which begins with an account headed
‘Leonard Mwaisumo’s Personal Life’, several themes are revealed which
profoundly shaped Leonard’s world. The first concerns his dual heritage
as a pagan and a Christian. We learn that he was born around 1910 in the
area of Selya.14 A genealogical diagram recorded by Monica in her early
days in the field indicates that Leonard’s parents were ‘commoners’ and
that he had three siblings: an elder brother and two sisters. His mother
converted to Christianity around the time Leonard started teaching
Godfrey Kinyakyusa.15 The rest of the family remained ‘pagan’.16
Linked to Leonard’s double heritage is the naming process, which has
much to say about his changing identities. Leonard was just one of six
names by which he had been known. He adopted this name at the age
of about fourteen and recalls having come across it while reading a local
Swahili newspaper.17 This is what Godfrey Wilson recorded of his succession of personal names, each of which relate to a change in his life history.
I was (1) Podyali – ‘It has been here’
(2) Sagisan’a – ‘Put a second one on top’18
14
15
16
17
18
That Leonard Mwaisumo was a commoner is also stated by Monica in the acknowledgments for Good Company. She contrasts this with Mwaikambo’s status as son of a
chief. Leonard’s approximate date of birth can be inferred from numerous references
in Godfrey Wilson’s notebooks. In March 1935 Leonard is said to belong to the 25–28
year old age group (WC, D1.1, Notebook 15). A reference elsewhere to his having been
‘before puberty’ in the early 1920s suggests that he is more likely to have been around
25 than 28 in 1935.
WC, D11, Monica Wilson/Dr Oldham of the IAI, 16 April 1935, Isumba.
WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 1 (L1).
Ibid.
This may be a reference to his being the second son.
Working with the Wilsons
167
(1) from birth, I was given it after my birth
(2) given me also by my parents, but later (as far as I can remember)
and (2) was the one they used (and still people call me that)
(3) Man’ogopa – I took this myself ‘I like it’; in about 1923 (?) before
puberty
(4) Matai (or Matadji) = Matthew – I took it myself – quite soon after
(3) – when I went to school (school 1 Feb. 1924)
(5) Tulinagwe – March 23 1928 was then baptized
(6) When I went to Swahili school (Sept. 1924) I began to take the
name Leonard. I heard the name from Mamboleo (the Swahili paper).
Still [uses] both (5) and (6), but (5) began to fade in 1933. (1) and (5)
must stay always; they are my names.19
While the different names that Leonard adopted at various times reflected
his changing and overlapping identities, his conversion to Christianity did
not signify a repudiation of his pagan background. In fact, Leonard was
a pagan when he started school and, even though the school was run by
missionaries, conversion was not a prerequisite.20
Not long after commencing with his schooling Leonard started contemplating conversion to Christianity. ‘By joining with the missionaries’,
he believed, ‘I will have the opportunity to learn very quickly at school’.
It was a decision he took for practical reasons to advance his educational
ambitions. As he saw things then, ‘it was more difficult for those people
or children who were not Christians to get a better education than those
who had already registered with missionaries’.21
Leonard’s view of Christianity was therefore pragmatic. He saw the
religion as a vehicle for accessing education and securing a place within
the tiny but influential new African elite. Literacy and the ability to
speak and write a European language (English in this case, but also a
local language, Swahili) definitively set Leonard (and others in his class)
apart. This opened up employment in the lower echelons of colonial
government as a court interpreter (native clerk). Monica aptly captured
some of the reasons that African converts in the Rungwe District gave
for conversion to Christianity.
One ambitious man I know well [Leonard] said that he had been baptised
because he thought he would learn quicker in school if he were. He saw
that those who were baptised learnt quickly. Baptism, he believed, gave
greater power to learn. Another [said] that he had been baptised because
he wanted to learn English, and the only school in the district which taught
English at that time only admitted converts. Both men are now, I think,
Christians for other reasons, but the initial impulse towards baptism was
19
20
21
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson Notebook 1, 103–4.
WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 1 (L1), ‘Leonard Mwaisumo’s Personal Life’,
1–16.
Ibid.
168
Inside African Anthropology
given by the desire for education, and to many education is a tool for getting
on in the European world.22
Leonard was a convert with an unusually liberal theology. Godfrey’s
notebooks reveal that Leonard rejected the fire-and-brimstone version
of Christianity espoused by many of the missionaries.23 His was a more
generous and hybrid version of theology. ‘We Christians don’t fear the
power of chiefs . . . I see some pagans as better in character than Christians.’ When asked by Godfrey how he had come to this view, Leonard
explained: ‘No one taught me this. I thought about it and read the Bible.’
He later said that he believed in ‘eternal life’ but not ‘in hell’, and that
we (‘I and other people like me’) ‘learnt this a little from the Gospel and
Catechism (where it is written), but I have never heard it preached by a
missionary or an elder . . . Myself I really learnt it from looking at people
and their lives’.24
This rather remarkable and freethinking homespun combination of
Christian conviction and lack of judgement of traditional culture made
Leonard (fortuitously for the Wilsons) an ideal intermediary. He could
serve not only to bridge the distance between them and their potential
informants in his community, but as an informant himself with a personal
history of living in one of the Christian communities being studied by
Monica, as well as with a deep knowledge of the ‘pagan’ communities
being studied by Godfrey.
The third key theme that shaped Leonard’s life was his pursuit of
literacy and multilingualism.25 This allowed for an unusual degree of
mobility. He left home in the early 1920s and stayed with relatives in
Mundamba village in the region of the small town of Ipinda whose location is shown in the map reproduced in the previous chapter (see Figure
4.3). This is where he started school. In 1926, when the British colonial
government introduced a system of indirect rule in Tanganyika, Leonard
stayed in Tukuyu for a month so that he could attend a Swahili school.
When this failed to bear fruit, he left for the Itete District, where he lived
with a relative for several months. This would have been within walking
distance of the later Isumba field-site base of the Wilsons.26 On 23 March
1928 he registered at an informal Swahili school in Mwakyembe and in
22
23
24
25
26
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June
1935.
A striking example of this theology of damnation features in a paper by Megan Vaughan
that quotes from the sermon of a local evangelist: ‘God looks in your heart and your sin
stinks before him . . . And he might come at any time to get you – 2 o’clock or 4 o’clock
or at 8 in the evening, or even at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists
and Others in South-West Tanganyika’, 16.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 37.
Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 2.
See Chapter 4.
Working with the Wilsons
169
early 1929 joined a formal Swahili school established by the Germans.27
This strong impulse for literacy facilitated Leonard’s mobility between
different areas, which in turn enhanced his wider knowledge of other
cultural groups in the region.
Leonard narrates his efforts to get an education as a victory against
the odds. Take, for example, his account of the creative ways in which he
raised his own school fees, which included selling his most prized cloth,
brewing beer, trading in honey, and growing and selling cabbages and
potatoes to local whites.28 He recounts his short stint of two months spent
as a labour migrant on the Lupa goldfields before resuming his studies
in October 1929.29 Leonard then took a break of about two months at
home in Selya before being offered a job as a teacher. After only four
weeks he received a message that he had been accepted at a school in
Tabora in the Rungwe District. He was at that school on and off until
he completed Standard 7, a very high level of education for a young
African man in this period.30 He was probably still in his early twenties
when he started working as Godfrey’s language teacher in September
1934. What made Leonard such a suitable candidate for the position
of research assistant was thus the combination of his dual identities, his
literacy and multilingualism, and his knowledge of the world beyond
his home district of Selya. It is to his relationship with the Wilsons and
his little-known contribution to their researches that we now turn.
Working with Godfrey, September 1934–January 1935
Godfrey’s early fieldnotes and a diary he recorded during his first four
months in the field provide an unusually vivid source of information
about his collaboration with Leonard Mwaisumo. Two days after arriving
in Tukuyu he engaged Leonard as his language teacher along with Alidi, a
27
28
29
30
The Germans had long followed a policy of promoting Swahili rather than German
among their converts, with all new missionaries having to take a Swahili language
course. One of the missionaries was Oscar Gemeseus, who would have been Leonard’s
teacher at Rungwe Mission School in the late 1920s. He returned to the mission in
1925 and would remain there after the Wilsons had left, having been appointed bishop
in 1933. Gemeseus was the leading figure of the ‘German restoration’, the return of the
German missionaries to Tanganyika in the mid-1920s after their expulsion at the end of
the First World War. He explained their reasons for promoting Swahili as follows: ‘We
were all fully convinced that it was our duty to keep the natives in their own nationality
as much as possible; to deliver to them a genuine and adequate knowledge of Christian
life, and to prevent with all means to breed a kind of black European. Therefore we
preferred Swahili, as an African language, to German, and had good experiences with
it.’ Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika, 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians
in the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 126, 159–180.
WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 1 (L1), ‘Leonard Mwaisumo’s Personal Life’.
Ibid.
Ibid.
170
Inside African Anthropology
Yao man from Northern Rhodesia, as his cook. Godfrey stated in his first
report to the Rockefeller Foundation, ‘I engaged an interpreter at once
and spent a month in Tukuyu learning the language’.31 Given that Godfrey had no published grammar or dictionary to work from, Leonard’s
services as a language teacher were indispensable. Godfrey’s ‘African
diary’ reveals that Leonard gave him daily lessons except on Sundays.
Many of the daily entries simply read: ‘Language with L. – fine.’32
A working dictionary entitled ‘Nyakyusa Research Vocabulary’ indicates the kind of subjects they collected information on in the early
months. These included domestic and basic conversational topics (‘Once,
Twice etc.’, ‘Food and Cooking’, ‘Parts of Body’), anthropological topics
of the day (‘Tenure of land’, ‘Values’, ‘Proverbs’), but also themes that
expressed their common biblical interest like ‘Words I Don’t Know in
Old Testament’. The sense of a shared masculine space of conversation
that Rebecca Marsland refers to in Chapter 4 was evident from the outset. This was expressed, for example, in the open and explicit vocabulary
Godfrey recorded under the heading ‘Sex and Child Birth’: ‘to copulate, to menstruate, the penis is erect, region of sexual organs, buttocks,
testicles, pubic hair, clitoris, vagina (word only used by women – L. He
would not speak it but wrote it down)’.33
This was a dialogue and the sense of curiosity was mutual. When
Godfrey began to establish a system for classifying Kinyakyusa grammatical forms in early December, Leonard is quoted as saying: ‘None ever
at any of the schools made me think about Kinyakyusa grammar at all.
I’d never thought about these things before.’34 Other notes suggest that
Leonard had an interest in grammar even before he worked daily with a
man who was a highly talented linguist.35 When Godfrey and Leonard
attended the funeral of one of Leonard’s relatives in April 1935, Godfrey provided a record that captures something of the spirit of the male
bond of sociability that the two were able to establish, and reveals that
Leonard’s interest in books went beyond his role as an assistant to an
eager young anthropologist:
Two assistants and the old man did most of the drinking. Ngemela, L. and
I helped. One of the assistants had brought tobacco and wanted paper for
wrapping. L. provided an old English exercise book from Rungwe. He [L.]
refused my offer of paper, but read it [his old exercise book] all greedily
before giving a couple of pages. ‘I don’t like to lose it. I have forgotten
some of it now (it was English grammar).’36
31
32
33
34
35
36
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Godfrey Wilson/Rockefeller Foundation
Offices, Paris, 9 Jan. 1936.
WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934–1935’.
WC, Godfrey Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Research Vocabulary’.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 10, 83, 93.
On Godfrey as linguist, see Chapter 4 in this volume.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 17, 70–71.
Working with the Wilsons
171
Figure 5.1. Leonard Mwaisumo with his mother and two sisters, 24 September
1934.37
Leonard was also, of course, Godfrey’s translator when they went
visiting informants or friends. On 24 September 1934 Godfrey recorded, ‘We (L and I) went to visit his mother who asked me to stay’.38
Godfrey took several photographs of Leonard and his family including
that reproduced above (Figure 5.1). At this point Leonard’s position was
probably beginning to shift from just being a language teacher to being
an interpreter. On 4 October 1934 Godfrey, accompanied by Leonard
(and possibly by other employees as well, including porters and a cook),
began the journey from Tukuyu on foot down to the shore of Lake
Nyasa. The road ended at Tukuyu. They went past local places such as
Muselela, where Godfrey read the former district administrator Major
Wells’s old records and tasted some new local foods that he pronounced
as ‘pleasing’. (He also shot pigeons and partridges.) At Ipande (today’s
37
38
The photograph was taken by Godfrey Wilson during his first month in the field. He
recorded in his ‘African diary’: ‘Monday 24 [Sept. 1934] Language with L. Visited his
mother + sisters (Kiponsa and Isumo or Enesi) at . . . the home where L. is staying.’
(WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, African Diary, 1934–1935). The occasion seemingly corresponds to the following entry in his second notebook. We have added just the names
of the speakers. ‘[Godfrey Wilson] Okewega bole lenga nogkewga ikifwani? How if I take
you, your reflection? i.e. photograph. [Leonard Mwaisumo] Ukahi ba = You have been
quick!’ (WC, D1.1, Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 2).
D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 1, 97.
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Ipinda) he met with Mwalatunda, the son of the local chief.39 He later
reported,
For six weeks after I reached Mwaya [at the coast], I carried out my investigation entirely through an interpreter. After that I made myself talk the
language, keeping the interpreter in the background to help me over difficulties. It was five months altogether before I could dispense with him.40
In only six months he was in a position to do the work of translation
himself. ‘14/3/35 Conversation with Mwaihojo [the local chief] and his
friends at Isumba. Missed a little as I was interpreting for myself, not
much.’41
Leonard took on many other roles in these conversations. He would
frequently comment on recently conducted interviews, usually in relation to the accuracy or falsehood of a given informant’s testimony. On 18
October 1934 Godfrey wrote down Leonard’s comment that ‘Mwalisisile
is hiding something’, and then ‘L’s comment – Don’t believe. It is never
done . . . ’42 Leonard would often add asides in the midst of interviews.
Godfrey would typically record ‘L. explains’ or just quote L. as in ‘this is
the custom always (L.)’. Significantly, he also took on the role of interviewer and Vaughan’s description of him as ‘an (indigenous) anthropologist’ certainly does seem apposite.43 We cite just two of many examples.
‘Interview with Mwangulile and Paoli [young men] . . . L. asked are you
not BaMwela?’44 After hearing evidence of Chief Mwaipopo’s hostility to Germans, he asked, ‘Why then do some people say we liked the
Germans?’45 The age, sex and status of the interviewees would have had
an influence on his role as questioner in interview situations.
Leonard’s familiarity with the local terrain enabled him to serve as a
guide on what Godfrey termed ‘safaris’. We should recall that throughout
his school years he was constantly on the move and his short stint at the
Lupa goldfields had brought him into direct contact with a range of
migrants and cultural groups. Leonard also served as a tutor of cultural
etiquette. On 10 October 1934 Leonard accompanied Godfrey from
Ipinda to Mwali. They arrived at ten thirty in the morning. Godfrey
recorded in his diary:
Food showered on me – bullock, bananas, fruit, eggs, chicken . . . When I
arrived and all was set in the clearing under the trees, L. said, ‘see Mwali
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
WC, D11 Correspondence with IAI, Godfrey Wilson/Rockefeller Foundation Offices,
Paris, 9 Jan. 1936.
Ibid.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 13, 74.
WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934’.
Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 14.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 6, 21.
Ibid., Notebook 16.
Working with the Wilsons
173
[shortened version of the name of the local chief Mwalisisile] won’t wish to
greet you . . . They can’t . . . [illegible] + greet you. It is not the custom.’ So
I went to them where they sat just among the bananas crouching to greet
me. All women crouch to greet men. And often a young man will crouch
to greet a chief.46
In Nyakyusa society, giving and receiving presents was an essential part
of every social relationship. Refusing a gift implied that one wanted to
break off all friendly relations. It would take someone who was a cultural
insider at some level to interpret such nuances and Leonard clearly fulfilled that role. But in other ways Leonard was an outsider. The fact that
he identified the Mwali people as ‘they’ implies that he viewed himself as
a cultural outsider, as a native of Selya and a Christian who saw ‘their’
customs as different from his own. In his own notebook record, which we
explore in detail later, Leonard placed strong emphasis on the importance
of local identities in making distinctions between the customs [ikikolo] of
the various cultural groups living in Selya, Kukwe, Ngonde, or the groups
referred to as Penja, Kinga, Ndali, Lambya, Lugulu, Bembe, Gogo,
Hehe, Nyika, Nyamwezi, Yao and others. Contrary to what the anthropologist James Ellison argues, the Wilsons did pay close attention to his
emphasis on the importance of local rather than wider ‘tribal’ identities.47
Leonard’s contribution as an informant is the aspect of his anthropological work that has been least appreciated, even in the relatively
generous acknowledgment of his work in the preface to Monica’s Good
Company. Before the rainmaker Kasitile became Godfrey’s main informant about ‘pagan’ rituals from around June 1935, it was Leonard who
was Godfrey’s, and then Godfrey and Monica’s, most trusted informant about Nyakyusa culture. Even the most casual reading of Godfrey’s
notebook record, and to a lesser extent of Monica’s fieldnotes, reveals
that he provided substantial amounts of rich ethnographic data. He is
far and away the most significant other in these records. In fact, his
notebook presence far eclipses that of Monica herself (who features only
in occasional asides from March 1935 onwards) and certainly contrasts
markedly with the muted presence of their second main research assistant, John Brown Mwaikambo, in Godfrey’s later notebooks.
46
47
WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934’.
James Ellison argues that the Wilsons should have paid closer attention to the local
variations in cultural practices that their research assistants were more fully attuned to,
and recorded in some details in their own notebooks. Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 6–7;
James G. Ellison, ‘Transforming Obligations, Performing Identity: Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’, Introduction (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of
Florida, 1999). But as Rebecca Marsland emphasises in Chapter 4, the published monographs do take regional and local variation into account. Monica’s detailed descriptions
of the distinctions between ‘rituals of kinship’ in Selya and Kukwe are a notable example
of this. See Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New
York and Toronto: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1957).
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Leonard told Godfrey about sexual practices, material culture from
building to pot-making with performative demonstrations at each point,
traditional stories and folktales. He would later give Monica detailed
information about crops, drawing on his experience of farming in his
teenage years. He appears to have shared with Monica a genuine interest
in agriculture and botany. As we shall see, he also served as her guide and
a main informant in her work on churches and Christian communities.
The data gleaned in conversations with Leonard did make its way into the
published monographs but sometimes without direct acknowledgment.
He is identified as the author of detailed commentaries on witchcraft that
feature in the ‘Selected Documents’ in the appendix to the first book in
the Trilogy, but his accounts of boys’ villages which provide the theme
and subtitle for Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (1951),
his information about Nyakyusa moral values that features at chapter
length in that study, about Nyakyusa mythology addressed in Rituals of
Kinship of the Nyakyusa (1956), and rainmaking and communal life discussed in Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (1959) – were equally crucial, but are much more difficult to track from the field to the published
text.
In October 1934 Leonard told Godfrey stories and folktales and
provided material on kinship. The following month Godfrey wrote of
‘Cogitations with L.’ on religion and missionaries. In January 1935
Leonard supplied him with information on the ‘sacred grove’ at Lubago and the chiefly lineages associated with the road to Lwembe, and
about rainmakers and rain-stones. Significantly, it was Leonard who
introduced Godfrey to the rainmaker Kasitile and filled in important
background details about him in January 1935.48
What of the more affective aspects of the relationship between Godfrey
and Leonard? The texts provide much evidence of a bond between the
two men that went far beyond their formal relationship as employer
and employee. We can see this, for example, in Godfrey’s brief record:
‘When I was sick, L. came and talked in English.’49 A later notebook
entry about witchcraft provides a glimpse of the bond that had formed
between these two young men over the preceding months. The scripting
is from Godfrey, son of a Shakespearean scholar, and there is a sense of
ease and lightness in the conversation.
G–
L–
48
49
Why are people shy of talking about obolosi [witchcraft] to me? Is
it because I am a stranger or because I am a European?
It is because you are a European. I would be shy of talking to a
Henga about it, but much more shy of speaking to a European
about it . . . Obolosi is a thing we speak about among ourselves.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 11, 44.
Ibid., Notebook 10, 79.
Working with the Wilsons
175
To strangers and especially to Europeans we only speak what is
necessary.
G – Some people think we [he and Monica] are abalosi ourselves!
L – (Laughed heartily and then said seriously) But they do say on the
Lupa that if a man, a European, finds a large nugget of gold he
always dies, is this not so?
G – No, probably he dies of drinking too much whiskey . . .
L – Oh, in that case (seriously and reflectively). But then they say that
the African who finds the nugget too is killed – you see the one who
finds it gets a reward. If a big nugget he gets 100/-; and there is a
boy who has just died. He found a big nugget, but he was working
with a gang all together, and the others said, ‘We all saw it too. We
will divide the “prize” between us.’ So they went to the European
and he decided to give the 100/- to the boy who’d actually found
it, and 90/- to be divided amongst all the rest. They each got about
6/- I heard. Then the boy started home with his 100/- and on the
way he died. What about that?
G – Perhaps fear killed him – my psychologists believe that fear can
make a man sick or die.
L – (Happily) Yes, I see, perhaps it was that.50
We also see, in Leonard’s own notebook record about sex, expressions
of the degree of openness between the two men. We have already noted
their early collaborative work in recording vocabulary relating to sex.
Leonard’s texts, which we analyse much more fully in a later section,
provide detailed and explicit information for Godfrey about Nyakyusa
sexual practices. For example, he wrote: ‘Linga unkikulu akanile ukusanuka linga mulipakubomba imbombo, kabuki kukubabula abakamwana bako
ukuti syesi umwaninu ikumbombele’ (If your wife refuses to turn around
during sexual intercourse, or refuses to have sex from the back, you
may go and inform your in-laws about what their daughter does to
you). Leonard also wrote about the usually taboo subject of ‘ukugonana
mbunyambala’ (homosexuality) among young boys. He began by noting
that homosexuality was not permitted in traditional Nyakyusa culture
and that young boys could be expelled from their families if they were
found to engage in such practices. However, he claimed that many young
boys did experience homosexual sex, especially when they were out tending cattle. They would learn by watching bulls mating with females and
then would start to practise themselves by asking their friends whether
they wanted to copy this behaviour.51
50
51
Ibid., Notebook 23, July 1935, 94–97.
WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo, Notebooks 4 and 5 (L4 and L5). The translation of
Kinyakyusa into English is our own (Timothy Mwakasekele). For evidence of Godfrey’s
equally explicit discussions with the rainmaker Kasitile about sex, though not about
homosexuality, see Vaughan, ‘Anthropologists and Others’, 16–17, where Kasitile talks
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Leonard appears passionate and energetic in his work. He was educated and ‘ambitious’ (in Monica’s view), so working for an anthropologist offered the potential for social mobility which, as we have seen, he
eagerly seized. He was also not as well off as his successor, John Brown
Mwaikambo, and financial considerations were undoubtedly important.
Leonard was one of four assistants employed by Godfrey in the early
months. He was paid 30 shillings per month, as opposed to the 33
shillings a month paid to the cook Alidi, the 25 shillings paid to the
domestic worker Kabiki and the 12 shillings paid to the messenger named
Timothy.52
There is, however, firm evidence of Leonard’s genuine interest in learning for its own sake, quite apart from the salary it could bring or the
opportunities it might offer for social mobility. Godfrey recorded at one
point that Leonard ‘has read the book of MacKenzie’, referring to The
Spirit-Ridden Konde, the standard ethnological text on the region that
had been published in 1925 by this Scottish missionary.53 It is possible
that Leonard owned a copy. Godfrey noted during a visit to Leonard’s
brother Mwambelile that this was where ‘L. keeps his books’.54 Monica
wrote of their visit in April 1935 to a preacher at the Kabembe mission
station who lived in a square modern house with a verandah, a bicycle
strung from the roof, photographs on the walls, a treadle sewing machine
on a table and European trees and flowers in his garden. ‘Two copies of
Swahili paper lying about. Leonard immediately pounced on them and
began reading.’55 Later references suggest that Leonard liked writing letters and that he used a mix of Swahili, Kinyakyusa and English when
writing to friends.56
52
53
54
55
56
of a man’s right to beat his wife if she does not agree to have sex, and asks Godfrey how
Europeans like himself would handle this kind of difficulty.
WC, A1.5 Godfrey Wilson, ‘African Diary 1934–1935’.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 7, 2. The reference is to David R. Mackenzie,
The Spirit-Ridden Konde: A Record of the Interesting but Steadily Vanishing Customs &
Ideas Gathered during Twenty-Four Years’ Residence among These Shy Inhabitants of the
Lake Nyasa Region, from Witch Doctors, Diviners, Hunters, Fishers & Every Native Source
(London: Seeley, Service, 1925). Mackenzie was one of the most influential evangelists
in the region and was known to many of the Wilsons’ informants. In fact, Godfrey
and Monica had made a special trip to Aberdeen in 1933 to visit Mackenzie and his
wife in order to get background information about the peoples and cultural practices
of south-west Tanganyika while planning their fieldwork. Monica Wilson interview:
‘Bunyakyusa’.
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 7, 30.
WC, D4.2 Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder headed ‘Christian Amusements’,
typed note headed ‘21/4/35 Lunch with Asagene’.
A cluster of letters written to the Wilsons in Kinyakyusa, but almost all addressed
to ‘Mwaipaja’ [Godfrey’s Kinyakyusa name] confirms that a culture of letter writing
had begun to develop in the region (WC, D10, ‘Letters to Godfrey Wilson mostly
in Nyakyusa, 1934–1939 including from John Mwaikambo, Timothy Mwanjisi, W.
Ambilikile Mwaisemba and T. L. Mwaisumo’). On the culture of letters and ‘tin-trunk
Working with the Wilsons
177
Working with Monica, March–November 1935
At the end of January 1935 Godfrey interrupted his fieldwork in Bunyakyusa, where he had spent the past months, and travelled to South Africa to
marry Monica Hunter at St Patrick’s-on-the-Hill in the Hogsback near
Alice, Eastern Cape. After a honeymoon in the Drakensberg the newlyweds flew to Mbeya to start their collaborative anthropological research
in the first week of March 1935. While Godfrey was to concentrate on
Nyakyusa men and ‘pagan’ customs, Monica would focus on the women
and the Christian community. As indicated in the previous chapter, the
nature of Nyakyusa society dictated that Godfrey should focus mainly
on men while Monica worked with women. She later recalled that ‘the
women and men led very separate lives and it wasn’t easy for a woman to
mix with a man who wasn’t part of her family, and it became quite clear
that it would be much more efficient for me to do most of my fieldwork
among the women and Godfrey to do the greater part of the fieldwork
among the men’.57
Their arrival signalled the continuation of the intense fieldwork among
the Nyakyusa that Godfrey had begun. For Monica it was a new fieldsite after the late stages of completing her Pondoland study. This new
research entailed making a broad comparison between Christian and
pagan life and observing where conversion and membership of a Church
entails fundamental changes in behaviour. In order to make any headway
in this new area, however, she needed to immerse herself in the local
language first, and again the task fell on Leonard’s shoulders. His role as
her language teacher commenced as soon as they had set up their base
camp at Isumba in March. This was the research site where they spent
most of their first six months in the field. Leonard and Monica had the
advantage of being able to work with Godfrey’s vocabulary and grammar.
In an interview with her son Francis and his wife Lindy in January 1982
(the year she died), Monica recalled the significance of the ‘clerk’ as a
key member of her household besides the cook, the houseman and the
‘tweeny’ (the drawer of water and firewood). ‘My first job was to learn the
language, because until I could talk [Kinyakyusa] I could talk to nobody
except Godfrey and the clerk [Leonard] . . . And nobody else spoke any
second language except Swahili.’58 The learning process proved to be
rather slower and more cumbersome than in Godfrey’s case in spite of
the language notes. That Leonard was at the core of this enterprise is
revealed in her first report to the IAI, submitted three months after her
57
58
literacy’ in Africa in this period, see Karin Barber, ed, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday
Literacy and the Making of the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2006).
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Bunyakyusa’.
Ibid.
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arrival in Bunyakyusa. ‘Up till now I have been giving the bulk of my time
to language, working at texts, on different aspects of the culture written
by one very competent interpreter, conversing with this interpreter and
with visitors, studying grammar, concentrating attention on language
when going about the villages with the interpreter.’59
As the above quotes suggest, Leonard was more than a language
teacher: he was just about the only other person besides Godfrey with
whom Monica could communicate in the early days. Leonard could speak
good English, given his level of education, and he was an invaluable companion: her conversations with him facilitated the difficult process of cultural adjustment. Godfrey often went off without her to conduct research
in remote places. Monica confessed that ‘quite often he was away for a
night or more and I had nobody to talk to except the clerk’. There were
certain situations in which his assistance as interpreter was less helpful
than in others. Monica was responsible for housekeeping. This included
taking charge of the domestic servants. She recalls that Alidi, their Yao
cook who was paid a higher wage than Leonard, ‘refused to take any
orders from the clerk. So I quickly had to learn enough Kinyakyusa, at
least to order the dinner’. In interviews with Nyakyusa women, Leonard
was of less assistance than he had been in the interviews he had done with
the Nyakyusa men who formed the vast majority of Godfrey’s informants. Monica recalled that ‘the women wouldn’t talk when the men were
there, certainly not when the clerk was there’.60 To manage both her
domestic sphere and her ethnographic research effectively, she had to
learn the language quickly.
Leonard continued to be a pivotal figure in teaching her the language.
He had regular language lessons with her and spent quite a lot of time
working with her on vocabulary. And, as we have mentioned, she could
use the language notes which Godfrey had compiled on his first field
trip – the same notes that the adjunct district officer, one of the many
government officials that the Wilsons had known in Isumba, was keen to
borrow after learning of their existence.61 A letter Monica wrote to her
informal mentor, Winifred Hoernlé, in May 1935 gives a candid account
of her struggles with the language and her degree of reliance on Leonard
in the early months.
Godfrey is getting ahead fast now that he has the language. I have been
concentrating on language, and can read texts, and understand quite a lot
now; conversation is just beginning to come. Many roots are similar to
59
60
61
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June
1935.
Monica Wilson interview: ‘Bunyakyusa’.
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June
1935.
Working with the Wilsons
179
Xhosa roots and that makes it easier to understand, but when apparently
similar verb forms turn up with different meanings speech is difficult.
Godfrey has found over seventy tenses and a new one appears every two
or three days – the table is somewhat alarming to the beginner! We have a
very efficient clerk who writes texts, and is teaching me. He and his wife
and mother are Christian, the rest of his family pagan. Through him I am
getting to know about mission contact.62
Where Leonard features primarily as a fellow conversationalist in Godfrey’s record, or perhaps even fellow ethnographer, he appears mainly as a
kind of all-purpose guide in the notes of Monica Wilson, a role analogous
to that performed by Michael Geza during her earlier work in Eastern
Pondoland. One important difference, however, was that in Bunyakyusa she was still almost entirely dependent on her guide’s language
skills.
In April and May 1935 we read of Leonard taking Monica on tours
of the local schools in the Isumba region. Her fieldnotes reveal that he
was constantly explaining how things worked based on personal experience and insider knowledge. ‘Visit to school. 1st April 1935, tumbled
down, 17 boys, 13 girls, learning letters. Boys using Swahili reading book.
L. says no roll kept . . . L. says teachers getting no pay now.’ Later she
recorded: ‘Kabembe school, May 24. Senior class. L. says all would be
in standard I if went to Rungwe . . . Kinyakyusa New Testament [read]
aloud. Teacher chooses pages – L. . . . Kinyakyusa riddles not seen before
by him. “Thinks it is a way of making children think” – L.’63 He also
accompanied her to church services and explained aspects of the Christian rituals to her. Under a subheading ‘Leonard. Christian death ceremonies’, we read ‘L. says Christians talk of not weeping too much at
funerals.’64 Monica attended the funeral of Leonard’s sister Enesi (see
Figure 5.1 above) and later that of one of Leonard’s nephews. She reported on the conflicts associated with ‘the opening of the bodies of the
deceased to discover the cause of death, consultation with diviners, and
the drinking of medicine as protection against sorcery, and against the
anger of neighbours over the failure to fulfil a kinship obligation.’65
62
63
64
65
WC D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernlé, 9 May 1935,
Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.
WC, D4.7, Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder labelled ‘Nyakyusa Christians’.
This is one of the fullest folders containing fieldnotes she recorded in Bunyakyusa.
WC, D4.6, Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder labelled ‘Christian Funerals’.
This was by contrast with (what she would later term) ‘the stylised wailing’ of women
at traditional funeral ceremonies in Bunyakyusa. Here she drew heavily on Godfrey’s
descriptions and early published ethnography. See Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship,
Chapter 2; Godfrey Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Conventions of Burial’, Bantu Studies, 13 (1939),
1–31.
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Dr Oldham, 16 April 1935,
Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.
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Leonard’s pragmatic attitude towards Christianity and openness about
embracing elements of the pre-existing African religious practices is evident from Monica’s account of an incident where his brother came to the
Wilson household to inform Godfrey about a diviner who was reputed
to be ‘a famous lion maker’ (Mwakionde, shown in Figure 4.1). The
diviner whom Leonard’s brother consulted apparently ‘diagnosed sorcery worked by the deceased’s ex-husband. It was believed that the sorcery had been directed against other members of the family’ and for that
reason the entire family had to partake in drinking protective medicine.66
Godfrey and Monica were in fact present at the specific ‘ceremony for
driving away sorcery after the death of the daughter’ of Leonard’s brother,
and they saw the two Christian members of the family (Leonard and his
mother) ‘taking a partial share in the proceedings’.67 Monica could still
not quite tell where the Christian brother (Leonard) stood in relation
to these old Nyakyusa customs, though she noted that ‘we [meaning
Godfrey and herself] are learning a good deal about his actions, and
feelings in the matter’.68 By the time she wrote to Mrs Hoernlé three
weeks later (9 May 1935), she was less hesitant and could give a more
vivid picture of Leonard’s and other Christian converts’ attitude towards
beliefs in witchcraft. Contrary to missionary expectations that sorcery
was a superstition that converts would inevitably reject, Leonard and
others saw no contradiction in being Christian and continuing to drink
the protective medicine given by the diviner. Ironically, when the nonChristian chief saw this he complained to a deacon of the church that
these people were ‘behaving like pagans’, to which the deacon replied
that everyone drank protective medicines. From the point of view of the
deacon, Leonard would have been suspended from church membership
only if he had taken the lead in going to a diviner.69
It is clear from the above that in having Leonard as their research assistant Godfrey and Monica had the added advantage of closely studying the
impact of European conquest and reactions to it as well as drawing in
both sides of the family as informants, which greatly enhanced their comparative project. Through getting to know them all, wrote Monica, ‘I am
learning about mission contact’. Whereas the non-Christian side of the
family provided the data that Godfrey required for his analysis of Nyakyusa ‘pagan customs’, the Christian side served as informants for Monica’s
work on the changes in behaviour brought about by mission contact.
66
67
68
69
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernlé, 9 May 1935,
Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.
Ibid., Monica Wilson’s first quarterly report, 16 June 1935.
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Dr Oldham, 16 April 1935,
Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson/Mrs Hoernlé, 9 May 1935,
Isumba, Rungwe District, Tanganyika.
Working with the Wilsons
181
As Monica’s language ability gradually improved, her dependence on
Leonard diminished. He still played a role as facilitator as late as November 1935, after they had moved their primary field-site from Isumba to
Rungwe Mission Station, some ten kilometres north of Tukuyu. It was
now a full fourteen months since Leonard had begun working with Godfrey. The Wilsons had learnt a great deal from Leonard in that time, but
he had also learnt from them, notably skills of research and writing.
The ‘Native Clerk’ as Author: Leonard Mwaisumo’s
Kinyakyusa Texts
We need, finally, to assess Leonard Mwaisumo’s contribution as an
author of ‘native texts’. Alongside his multiple interpretive roles, his
work as author was particularly important – and it is with this contribution that he is most strongly associated in the published record. James
Ellison has made a case for the significance of texts recorded by Africans
about ‘tribe’ and custom in the making of cultural knowledge in interwar
Tanganyika. He locates the 28 notebooks (containing some three thousand pages of documentary records on Nyakyusa customs) written by
the Wilsons’ research assistants in the wider context of writings about
culture by Africans authored at the time. Provincial and district commissioners in southern Tanganyika were influenced by a 10-page analysis
of the Mchapi witchfinding movements in the wider region written by
Edward Shofa, a clerk at Sambawanga. The ideas of another local cultural interpreter, Mwambenja Mwaisabile, had played a significant role
in shaping the decisions of Rungwe district commissioners in the selection of paramount chiefs, with the coming of indirect rule in 1926. We
have already noted Megan Vaughan’s analysis of the prolific writings of
the Tukuyu clerk Kenneth Mdala, promoting a specific tribal identity
with an emphasis on his own Yao lineage.
Ellison reads the texts of the Wilsons’ assistants, the bulk of which
were recorded by Leonard Mwaisumo and John Brown Mwaikambo, as
‘political’ interventions designed to promote particular conceptions of
identity, both ‘tribal’ and highly localised.
Assistants did not merely convey the ‘practices, meanings and values’ which
people of some culture ‘held to be of central importance’, they intervened
in the production of knowledge and of texts from idiosyncratic positions,
determined in part by their own agendas or more subtly by their backgrounds and experiences . . . The three assistants of the Wilsons [including
Timothy Mwanjin, who recorded just one notebook] were all mission educated, had worked for the colonial government, and all had lived outside
their home districts. They all spoke, wrote and read English, Swahili and
Kinyakyusa, and aspired to lives that involved literacy and multilingualism.
From 1934 to 1938 they wrote fieldnotes for the Wilsons that included
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interviews with informants. Their notebooks were highly though subtly
political; they contained messages about their own and their informants’
positions as well as their opinions about European racism.70
He goes on to note that the research assistants saw their role primarily
in these terms, citing Leonard Mwaisumo’s comment about ‘the work
we are doing of writing down customs’, identified variously as ‘old’,
‘European’, ‘school’, ‘Christian’ or ‘government’ customs.71
Our own emphasis has been on the complexity of Leonard’s roles and
motives. While one can make the case for his interventions being ‘subtly
political’, his comments and texts were seldom motivated by an attempt
to promote any broad notion of tribal or lineage identity (in the same
sense, say, that Mdala was attempting).72 They were highly situational
and varied significantly, as we have seen, according to whether he was
working with Godfrey or Monica, and to suit the stage of the research
process as he focused on language learning or information gathering.
The concept of the ‘intimate politics’ of knowledge introduced by Nancy
Jacobs and discussed in an earlier chapter,73 one which relates closely to
a small and changing network of social relations at particular sites, seems
more useful here than the more general notion of politics associated
with ‘inventing tradition’, the framework within which Ellison locates his
discussion.
Leonard began his notebook record in January 1935 at the time
Godfrey was preparing to leave the field. His record of customs that
followed the brief autobiographical account discussed above was thus
conceived as an independent supplement to the data collected by Godfrey. Monica’s description of his writings in the middle months of 1935
confirms that this was how they saw his texts.
In the collection of dreams and in the writing of vernacular accounts of
customs, songs, reports of law cases, statements of experts, etc., we find
our clerk – the interpreter – invaluable. He now spends the bulk of his time
on this work. Efforts to use other informants to write accounts have not
been successful because no-one in this immediate area except the man we
have can write fluently.74
70
71
72
73
74
Ellison, ‘Bilingual Assistants’, 2.
Ibid., 2.
Ellison provides little more than the occasional evidence of these subtle political motivations in the case of Leonard, as in his comment cited in relation to burial customs
in Notebook 3: ‘All we who are of the tribe of Selya . . . ’ (113). He also refers to the
involvement of Timothy Mwanjin in multiracial politics in the Tanganyika United Party
some fifteen years after having worked for a short time with Wilsons (Ellison, ‘Bilingual
Assistants’, 2).
Nancy J. Jacobs, ‘The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa’, Comparative
Studies of Society and History, 48, 3 (2006), 564–603; Chapter 2 in this volume.
WC, D11 Correspondence with the IAI, Monica Wilson’s second quarterly report, 30
August 1935.
Working with the Wilsons
183
Leonard’s seven notebooks contain the rich and highly textured narratives
one might expect from a cultural insider. The perspective is distinct from
that of the Wilsons. In Good Company, as noted earlier, there is a strong
reliance in the subsection ‘Procedure in witchcraft cases’ on Leonard’s
voice. This section includes a case where Leonard’s mother was accused
of bewitching the village cows and one of her younger sons having to
drink the umwafi on her behalf.75 Leonard had drunk the umwafi as a
child.76
What is most striking in this notebook record is the depth of detail in
the discussion of gender relations among the Nyakyusa, and the open,
straightforward accounts of polygamy, witchcraft, divorce and sexual
behaviour including sections on incest and homosexuality. Divorce, a
subject that is explored at length in the fourth notebook, appears in the
text as a very common phenomenon, something that neither Christians
nor ‘pagans’ were anxious about. On the whole Nyakyusa society seems
to have had a very liberal attitude towards divorce, perhaps the traditionalists more so than the Christians. This was also a matter where in-laws
and the chiefs’ courts had a major role to play in providing counsel or
annulling a marriage. Leonard gives a sense that divorce could be initiated by either a wife or husband if she or he was unhappy in a marriage.
Lack of sexual fulfilment features as one of the major causes of divorce.
He provides many stories (told by his informants) whereby grievances
concerning sex ended in a divorce – a major topic of discussion especially
among women.77
Notebook 5 deals with women’s attitudes towards polygamy. Most of
Leonard’s female informants disliked polygamy because of the conflicts
and jealousies that often arose within such marriages. Most preferred
onkeja, meaning marriage to a man who had never married before. Some,
however, said they preferred polygamous marriages, something which is
hardly surprising given the arduous nature of agricultural work (performed by both men and women) that was at the core of their livelihood.
Even so, those women who favoured polygamy still preferred to be first
wives, a position which accorded senior status and authority over junior
wives within a household.
Leonard cited many examples of women who sued for divorce because
their husbands had decided to get additional wives. Often such a woman
would not initiate a divorce unless she had found another suitor who was
prepared to marry her after the annulment of the marriage. Women in
such a position, he writes, ‘try to keep away from their husbands while
75
76
77
Monica Wilson, Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (London, New York
and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1951), 109–121, 241–243.
Ibid., 244–245.
WC, D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 4 (L4).
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Inside African Anthropology
they struggle for divorce’ out of fear of falling pregnant and missing their
opportunities of remarriage.78
Most of this information about witchcraft and divorce was derived
through sittings in local courts and collected at Godfrey’s request. In
equal measure, the notebooks deal with the issues closest to Monica’s
heart. In the latter part of Notebook 1, presumably recorded in March
after Monica’s arrival, we read accounts about cooking and other
domestic matters, as well as information about customary ways of treating crops. In Notebook 3 we read of the customs used to stop children
crying, recorded at a time when Monica was collecting data about children’s education, and later of dreaming and dreams, again a distinctive interest of Monica’s dating back to her East London days (Notebook 4).79
One should also note that numerous texts authored by Leonard feature
not in his own notebook record but in Godfrey’s notebooks or on the
loose-leaf pages filed in folders as Monica’s fieldnotes. These insertions
were sometimes brief, but often they ran into numerous pages. Some
were written for Godfrey as in the case of the burial customs ‘written by
L. when I was away on 4/2/35’ but most were written for Monica, to judge
by their themes: a five-page text on women’s property, an eight-page one
on ‘Christian amusements’ (the title she later chose for one her files), a
text on a Christian funeral, another on ‘Education at home’. They were
all recorded in Kinyakyusa, but occasionally there was some introductory
information in English. Here, for example, is an extract from a two-page
text on a Christian funeral written by Leonard on 31 October 1935. This
was just a few days before he left the Wilsons to take up his job as a
government clerk.
[Funeral of] Tupilike 31/10/35
Carrying her to N.[Nyakyusa] doctor who is a woman.
Water in doctor’s hut.
Dream of the doctor before anything happened (Samotela)
Carrying her to her own father. Another girl going to see her and said
the girl was about to die.
Quarel [sic] when dead [sic] between husband and brother of hers,
saying we want to weep here first for some time and then hours of
waiting to cary [sic] the body direct to his father who is at Ipenja.80
This is followed by ten pages of text in Kinyakyusa describing these
events in more detail. If these additional notebook and fieldnote inserts
78
79
80
Ibid., Leonard Mwaisumo Notebook 5 (L5).
See Chapter 3 in this volume. She used some of this information when she wrote about
Nyakyusa dreams in her first article based on their Bunyakyusa fieldwork. See Monica
Hunter, ‘An African Christian Morality’, Africa, 10, 3 (1937), 265–291.
WC, D4.6 Monica Wilson Nyakyusa fieldnotes, Folder labelled ‘Christian Funerals’.
Working with the Wilsons
185
are taken into account, Leonard Mwaisumo’s written record on Nyakyusa
‘customs’ (ikikolo) would number close to a thousand pages.
Eighteen Months as Government Clerk,
November 1936–April 1938
In mid-November 1936 Leonard Mwaisumo was accompanied by
Godfrey to the boma outside Tukuyu to take up an official position as a
government clerk. As we have seen, Monica established that this was the
most coveted position available for the small emerging literate African
elite, one that commanded a superior salary to any other position.
One clerk [Kenneth Mdala] in Tukuyu Boma who had passed Std. VI
in Nyasaland (10 years of schooling) was earning 18 pounds a month;
another who had passed Std. III was earning 17 pounds 11 shillings a
month. These two were exceptionally competent, but the possibility of
rising to such positions is naturally a very great attraction to the capable
and ambitious.81
These were sums far in excess of the 30 shillings a month that Leonard
had earned as a research assistant, and Monica’s correspondence suggests
that they clearly regarded him as competent, efficient and ambitious. In
short, he had a promising career ahead of him.
Leonard had probably had his eye on such a position when he
began working with the Wilsons, however passionately he might have
acquitted himself as indigenous anthropologist. Two days after meeting
Godfrey, he shared his close knowledge of the history and sociology of
government clerks. ‘Five years ago [1929] there was no Nyakyusa in
the Boma except the messengers. Most of the clerks were Nyasa. Some
married Tukuyu women and made friends with the Nyakyusa and got
their friends jobs.’ This is the Nyasa diaspora of the late 1910s and
1920s that Vaughan describes, and of which Kenneth Mdala was a prime
example. In recent times, however, the British government had reversed
its policy and employed almost entirely ‘local men’ so that of the ‘about
30 men (clerks) in the Boma [in September 1934], all but one [Mdala] is
Wanyakyusa (L.)’.82
Even after he had moved to the boma, Leonard kept in contact with
the Wilsons and occasionally came over for a visit and conversation over
a meal. Monica wrote to her father about Leonard’s new job and a
conundrum that he found himself in.
Leonard, our former clerk, who is now clerk of the highest native court
(i.e. an appeal court of senior chiefs) some miles out of Tukuyu, came in
81
82
WC, D11 Correspondence with the International African Institute, Monica Wilson’s
quarterly report, n.d. [but probably Oct. 1937].
WC, D1.1 Godfrey Wilson, Notebook 1, 50, Monday 10 Sept. 1934.
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Inside African Anthropology
to see us. He, poor man, is having a tough time avoiding bribes. Friends
of his who have cases arrive with a hen or a little rice ‘to greet him’.
Such presents are customary, and it is considered very high handed to
refuse them, but it’s impossible to draw the line between such presents and
bribes. He’s doing the only thing – refusing all presents from people who
have cases – but in consequence is getting the reputation of being standoffish, and unfriendly with poorer and less-educated friends. It’s obviously
a very difficult situation. I hope he does not succumb. I think he will survive
though few clerks do.83
Her subsequent comments give some sense of the friendship the Wilsons
had developed with Leonard, but of course one that could never be on
equal terms given their much more privileged backgrounds and financial
position. ‘Leonard is very much a friend and poured out his difficulties.
They are hardly the sort of thing that could be confided to a [British]
government official, but he was badly wanting a little sympathy.’84
In the (never published) draft manuscript on Nyakyusa Christians that
Monica penned a year or two after leaving Bunyakyusa, she noted in
passing that ‘one government clerk I knew expressed his intention of
returning home and growing coffee and rice on a large scale for sale after
having worked for some years for the government, but he died before [he
had] been two years a clerk’.85 This was Leonard Mwaisumo. We have
unusually detailed accounts about the circumstances surrounding his
death in April 1938. The Wilsons’ domestic assistant Kabiki, a man who
had worked with Leonard during all his months with the Wilsons, wrote
to them in Livingstone the month after Godfrey had officially taken up his
prestigious new position as the first director of the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute. He informed them of the sad news.
Leonard was suffering from pneumonia. He suffered only three days. At
that time he wanted to go to [the hospital at] Mbeya where there were white
people, but he started suffering. Then after that he died . . . They took the
body to the hospital . . . they found his lungs were damaged since he was
coughing.86
John Brown Mwaikambo was an age-mate who had known Leonard
from school days at the Swahili school and at Rungwe. He also wrote
about Leonard’s tragic death. His letter was also addressed to ‘Mr G. B.
Wilson’ rather than to both of the Wilsons and his tone towards Godfrey
was warm.
83
84
85
86
WC, B5.1 Correspondence from MW to her father, Monica Wilson/David Hunter, 23
Oct. 1936, Rungwe, Tanganyika.
Ibid.
WC, D4.7 Draft manuscript, Section on ‘Schools’, Folder labelled ‘Nyakyusa Christians’.
WC, D10 Letters to GW mostly in Nyakyusa, Angumbwike Kabiki Mwambandile/Mr
G. B. Wilson, 24 June 1938, Tukuyu.
Working with the Wilsons
187
You know that in the letter of Kabiki he narrated everything about Leonard.
Then I also want to write since you know that I like to understand. When he
died the whole area was terrified. He started to get ill on the 15th of April.
It started when he was typing; it was like someone injected something into
his chest. He was learning through correspondence since they wanted to
send him to Mbeya. He died on the 21st of April at 15:03. He was suffering
from pneumonia. Leonard used to claim that they had bewitched him.
Then I also believed that it is true they have bewitched him since many
people were against him. He claimed that Mwakatumbula is the one who
did that. After his death, he was carried to Nselya where he was buried.87
Were these suspicions and claims about bewitchment not directed at
those people whose bribes he had earlier refused? In any event they again
provide evidence of the complex combination of investment in ‘old customs’ (here witchcraft) along with his active engagement in ‘government
customs’ in his official job as a clerk recording and archiving government
documents.
Conclusion: Leonard Mwaisumo as Insider
Ethnographer
We began the chapter by discussing an emerging recognition of the
importance of figures in African history, and in particular in the history of literacy and of knowledge production in Africa. In keeping with
the significant recent collection on the role of literate Africans in colonial rule (Lawrance et al., eds, Interpreters, Intermediaries and Clerks), our
approach has been biographical and textual as we sought to narrate in
some detail the story of one Nyakyusa ‘native clerk’, first as assistant
to anthropologists and then as an official government functionary who
acted as one among that substantial cohort of African intermediaries
whose ‘collaborative bargains’ made colonial rule in Africa possible.88
The emphasis has been on that period of 15 months between September
1934 and November 1935 when Leonard Mwaisumo worked as a paid
research assistant, first for Godfrey Wilson and then for both Godfrey
and Monica Wilson. Their rich records allow for a reconstruction that is
probably fuller than is possible in most other cases.
This evidence suggests that, while Leonard was indispensable to the
research work of both Wilsons, his relationship and precise roles varied
according to whether he was working with Godfrey or with Monica. In
his collaboration with Godfrey there is much more sense of intimacy
87
88
WC, B10 Letters to GW mostly in Nyakyusa, John Brown Mwaikambo/Mr G. B. Wilson
in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, 24 June 1938, Ibungila.
Lawrance et al., eds, Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks; see also Emily L. Osborn,
‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule
in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, 44, 1 (2003), 29–50.
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Inside African Anthropology
and dialogue, of their joint immersion, after the early weeks of one-onone language learning, in a male world of conversation and conviviality,
‘good company’ that was distinctively masculine. Godfrey’s linguistic gift
and early fluency facilitated a kind of ease and warmth of relations. His
interactions with Leonard are characterised by a balance of serious intent
and lightness of spirit, with laughter a frequent feature in Godfrey’s record
of their conversations. Monica was, in Marsland’s terms, more of an
‘observer’ than a ‘participant’. Her outsider status ensured that Leonard
played an essential role as a companion and guide on her field trips to
school and church. There is little sense here of ‘intimacy’ and more sense
of dependence. She comes across in these records as an anthropologist
on the margins relying on her skilled insider to serve as her eyes and ears.
‘L. says’ echoes through her fieldnotes. This dependence can also be
seen in the extent to which she came, in the later stages of her research,
to rely on Leonard as author, as he recorded information at her request
about the Christian communities that were at the centre of her research
project.
Our case for complexity, based on a very close reading of these notes
recorded on site, relies on documenting the multiple functions that
Leonard Mwaisumo performed in the making of the Wilsons’ cultural
knowledge. He taught both of them the language, and co-authored the
Kinyakyusa manuscript vocabularies and dictionaries that Monica would
use in the writing of her four Nyakyusa monographs and still intended to
have published in the final years of her life. He guided them both through
the landscape and instructed them in matters of cultural etiquette. He
served as the epicentre of the social networks through which they worked,
especially Godfrey, who established the community of ‘friends’ with
whom Monica could later work. He was a skilled translator and active interviewer who took it upon himself to ask questions of informants.
Above all, though, we have argued that he was himself a treasure trove
of cultural information, a cultural insider who recorded information that
went beyond the selected texts on witchcraft.
Leonard straddled not just the European and the Nyakyusa worlds, but
the worlds of the ‘pagan’ and Christian sections of the Nyakyusa communities. It was his dual insider identity that made him such a valuable
intermediary. His insider knowledge was expressed in interviews and conversations, but also (as we have said) in his work as an author of ‘native
texts’, predominantly recorded in his own notebooks but also in hundreds of pages interspersed in the fieldnotes of the Wilsons. The voice in
these texts is distinctively that of the insider commenting with a deep and
detailed knowledge on matters ranging from sexual customs, divorce and
marital relations to Christian funerals and European-introduced crops
and schools.
Working with the Wilsons
189
What should we call such a figure in the light of these rich records of
his contribution and recent debates over terminology?89 He was certainly
a ‘cultural broker’ who taught the Wilsons the Nyakyusa language and
about local customs and cultural etiquette. He was a ‘middleman’ as he
facilitated the bridging of the European/Nyakyusa and ‘pagan’/Christian
worlds. There is a strong case to be made that he was an ‘intellectual’ in
his own right, his love of reading and long-standing interest in books but
also his sophisticated and open-minded reading of biblical texts being
evidence of an independent mind and love of scholarship for its own
sake. He can surely also be considered an ‘indigenous anthropologist’ in
posing his own questions, with his patent passion about ‘customs’ old and
new, and especially with his skill in recording ethnographic information,
albeit still as raw data that was partially analysed rather than a finished
report or analytical monograph.
What form of acknowledgment would have been right for this man
who performed multiple roles? And, as Pamela Reynolds reflects in the
concluding chapter of this volume, by what criteria and ethical standards do we judge a given acknowledgment to have been ‘adequate’ or
otherwise?
89
The most helpful discussion on the respective merits of the terminological debate is to
be found in Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 11–15.
Part 3
Fort Hare and the University of Cape Town
Figure P.3. Monica’s first graduate student in anthropology, the late Livingstone
Mqotsi (1921–2009) in conversation with Leslie J. Bank and Andrew Bank in
June 2007. Scholars have paid insufficient attention to Wilson’s contribution
as a mentor of South African anthropologists, including a generation of black
anthropologists who wrote important but hitherto hidden insider ethnographies.
Photographer: Rui Assubuji, June 2007.
6
‘Your Intellectual Son’: Monica Wilson
and Her Students at Fort Hare, 1944–1946
Seán Morrow
This chapter is about Monica Wilson at the South African Native College,
Fort Hare, from July 1944 to December 1946. It looks at why she went
there and the effects of the experience on her and on her students; her
choice to stay in South Africa rather than become a figure in British or
American anthropology, her origins perhaps hardly remembered by her
colleagues and readers; her students at Fort Hare and her non-racial
Christian liberalism in a South Africa where space for critical voices was
shrinking; and the tenuous thread that continued to join black and white
in a society where it was easy to retreat into nationalist laagers.
The chapter also considers the self-mastery of a woman of 36 with two
small children, left widowed and in penury by the suicide of the brilliant
husband to whom she was devoted, faced with writing, alone, studies
based on more than three years of joint fieldwork and intense intellectual
and personal commitment in Tanganyika. At Fort Hare she had to teach
university students, for the first time, within six weeks of her husband’s
death. However, she had been born and grown up in the Tyumie Valley,
whose river flows from the Hogsback Mountain past Lovedale Mission,
Fort Hare and the town of Alice. This was where she had conducted her
first field research. She was linked to local people and to Fort Hare by
Lovedale’s religious and social networks, and to the best of her students
by a common fascination with the changing South Africa of which they
were all part. She was, in many ways, an ‘insider’ anthropologist.1
Death, Family and Locality
In early 1938, after a break in South Africa, Monica joined her husband
Godfrey in Northern Rhodesia where he had been appointed the first
1
This chapter is based largely on documents contained in the Monica and Godfrey Wilson
Collection (WC) in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, University of Cape
Town. A substantial part of this extensive record remains uncatalogued, and references to
this material are provisional. Interviews have also been helpful, some with informants –
Mr Joe Matthews and Mr Livingstone Mqotsi – who sadly have since died. I would like
to thank all interviewees, and the exceptional Manuscripts and Archives staff, for their
assistance.
193
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Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), based in Livingstone. She had a child, Francis, in May 1939. In Northern Rhodesia,
Monica focused on the role of wife and homemaker in the enervating Livingstone climate, a somewhat isolated figure amidst the intensely
hierarchical and for the most part intellectually limited community of
colonial civil servants and their wives. This was relieved by lengthy visits
to her parents in South Africa, and by the presence of the archaeologist
Desmond Clark and his wife Mary, and, somewhat later, when he was not
on fieldwork, that of Max Gluckman and his wife, also Mary. Monica
also went with Godfrey to the mining town of Broken Hill where she
helped him with his research. There she attended the dances of the clerks,
medical orderlies and other members, men and women, of the incipient
African elite of the town, making acute observations that were reflected
in Godfrey’s pathbreaking The Economics of Detribalisation in Northern
Rhodesia. Above all, Monica focused on her child, Francis: she was a
devoted and hard-working mother. Work on the Nyakyusa material, for
instance, was subsidiary at this stage to her parental role.
Early in 1941 Monica shared the trauma of Godfrey’s resignation from
the RLI on account of his pacifism and perceived closeness to Africans.
They returned to South Africa, spending a year working together on
The Analysis of Social Change and living in a cottage on her parents’
land at Hogsback. She remained at Hogsback when Godfrey joined an
ambulance unit in the South African army in April 1942. After training he
was based first in Port Elizabeth and then, in 1943, in Egypt. The couple
continued to work on the book by post. In August 1943 their second son,
Timothy, was born. Late in the year Godfrey was accepted for the Army
Education Service and returned to South Africa for training following
which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Overwhelmed by the
depression to which he was intermittently subject, he took his own life in
Pretoria in May 1944.2
The South African Native College was founded in 1916, in part to deflect
the initiative of a group of educated Africans and keep higher education
for Africans in the hands of missionaries and their associates.3 It was
2
3
This and the previous paragraph are based on material in the Wilson Collection at
UCT Manuscripts and Archives, and on Wilson family papers. Richard Brown’s chapter,
‘Anthropology and Colonial Rule: Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute,
Northern Rhodesia’ in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New
York: Humanities Press, 1973), 173–197, is essential on Godfrey’s directorship of the
RLI. See also Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change: Based on
Observations in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945); Godfrey
Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, parts 1 and 2
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 [Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia: RLI
Series, 1941 and 1942]).
Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the
Making of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1993), 177–181;
‘Your Intellectual Son’
195
built on the site of a large nineteenth-century fortification, its name
redolent of the frontier wars.4 In keeping with missionary conceptions of
Africans as essentially rural and cities as destructive of the supposed rural
virtues of hierarchy and ordered morality, the college was established in
Alice in the rural Eastern Cape, close to the influential Free Church of
Scotland educational centre of Lovedale.5 It served not only South Africa
but also British Africa as far as Kenya and Uganda, and was the only
higher education institution for Africans in the region. In some respects,
though, for many years it was like a secondary school, preparing students
for matriculation as well as teaching towards University of South Africa
degrees.
Monica taught at Fort Hare from July 1944 to the end of 1946 in
the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband. This was a time of
great personal difficulty for her. Joanne Tyler, then Hardwich, a playmate
of Monica’s son Francis, remembers her as ‘very sad’.6 Yet Fort Hare
had been part of Monica’s life from childhood. On leaving school, she
attended lectures part-time at Fort Hare, where according to her mother
she got ‘more help in Latin and History than she did at school’.7 She
had friends there, and on one visit home had given a talk about ‘Magic’
to staff and students in March 1934;8 in 1937 she had been asked by
the principal, Alexander Kerr, to serve on a committee with Zachariah
Keodirelang (‘Z. K.’) Matthews and others on the employment of Fort
Hare graduates as fieldworkers.9
With Godfrey’s death, Monica needed money quickly. They were not
well off, as is clear from Godfrey’s many detailed messages about the
paltry army pay which she collected at Alice post office. She badly needed
the £72.19.8 due to Godfrey’s estate from the army.10 Her writing was
another source of income. In September 1944 John Dover Wilson, who
had been looking after her interests with Cambridge University Press,
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Songezo Ngqongqo, ‘Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana 1858–1910: The Making of the
New African Elite in the Eastern Cape’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Fort
Hare, 1996.
Colin G. Coetzee, ‘Forts of the Eastern Cape: Securing a Frontier, 1799–1878’, unpublished typescript (1994), 451–492.
In the later nineteenth century, Lovedale missionaries founded the equally influential
Livingstonia in Malawi, on the borders of Monica’s later research area in southern
Tanzania and northern Malawi. See John McCracken, Politics and Christianity in Malawi
1875–1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Interview with Professor Joanne Tyler, Hogsback, 16 August 2008. Unless otherwise
stated, all interviews are by Seán Morrow.
WC, BB3, Letters Jessie Hunter/David Hunter 1900–1940, Jessie Hunter/David
Hunter, 12 May 1926, Lovedale.
Ibid., Jessie Hunter/David Hunter, 28 March 1934, Lovedale.
WC, B1, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 22 May 1937, Lovedale; ibid., Monica
Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 18 May 1937, Lovedale.
WC, A1.14, Officer in charge of War Records/Monica Wilson, 1 Dec. 1944, Pretoria.
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Figure 6.1. Godfrey Wilson during the War.11
advised her to accept the terms offered for the forthcoming The Analysis
of Social Change.12 Monica also tried unsuccessfully to obtain an army
pension, arguing that Godfrey’s condition had been directly aggravated
by military service. In particular she asked for help with her children’s
education. She solicited the testimony of Dr Leonard Browne of the
Tavistock Clinic, who had treated Godfrey in London from June 1932.
She was also aided by the philosopher, psychologist and family friend
Bernard Notcutt, a captain in the Army Education Service during the
War. The pension was refused on the grounds that Godfrey’s death ‘did
not arise out of and in the course of the discharge of his military service
and was not aggravated thereby’.13
11
12
13
WC, N3 Photographs of Godfrey Wilson. There are numerous copies of this image in
the Wilson Collection.
WC, uncat. corr., John Dover Wilson/Monica Wilson, 27 Sept. 1944, Balerno.
WC, A1.14, Papers re Godfrey Wilson’s Death, Commissioner for Pensions/Monica
Wilson, 24 Oct. 1944, Pretoria. See also ‘final and binding’ disallowance by the Appeal
Board, ibid., Secretary, Military Pensions Appeal Board/Monica Wilson, 29 Jan. 1946,
Pretoria.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
197
In response to Monica’s desperate need for a regular income, almost
immediately after Godfrey’s death the director of Fort Hare, Alexander
Kerr, offered her a temporary appointment as lecturer in social anthropology from July 1944, and wardenship of Elukhanyisweni, ‘Eluk’, the
women students’ hostel. Kerr had known Monica ‘practically all her
life’14 and had approached her with a job offer in February 1943 that
she might have accepted if she had not been pregnant.15 He promised substantive appointment from January 1946 on the post’s receiving
ministerial approval. She accepted.16 Z. K. Matthews, husband of her
Lovedale school friend Frieda (née Bokwe) was her head of department,
and, chosen by Godfrey, godfather of her younger son Tim.17 Elizabeth
Colson, seeking background to her new job at the RLI, stayed with Monica on her way to Northern Rhodesia and was introduced to Monica’s
father and to her Lovedale and Fort Hare friends, including Matthews.18
Z. K.’s son Joe, born in 1929, remembered the friendship between his
mother and Monica, grounded in the ties between their fathers David
Hunter and John Knox Bokwe, missionary and minister in the same
Church. As Joe said and Francis Wilson confirmed, it was an intimate
and enduring bond, focusing on mutual friends, children and domestic
concerns. Friendships of this kind, a counterpoint to her intellectual relationships, are apparent through Monica’s life.19 These were powerful ties
of emotion, religion, friendship and duty.
In working at Fort Hare, Monica was consenting to the Christian vision it represented. She had no choice, if she was to teach Africans at
tertiary level. She may have remembered earlier interactions with the
then communist Eddie Roux, who applied for a Fort Hare job in 1929.
Though one of his referees was the illustrious W. M. Macmillan, he was
also asked to provide a testimonial from a Church minister, an impossibility for the irreligious Roux. If he did not get the job, which he did not,
‘I shall console myself’, he said, ‘by saying that they have found a better Christian though probably a worse biologist’.20 The following year,
in their flirtatiously sparring correspondence, he upbraided Monica on
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
University of Fort Hare Staff Files, M. Wilson Personal File, Alexander Kerr/[Registrar,
Rhodes University College], 11 June 1946, [Fort Hare].
WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 11 Feb. 1943, Port Elizabeth.
Ibid., Alexander Kerr/Monica Wilson, 27 June 1944 [Fort Hare]; Monica Wilson/
Alexander Kerr, 28 June 1944, Lovedale.
WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Dr Tom Alty,
21 Jan. 1977, Hogsback.
Telephone interview with Professor Elizabeth Colson, 19 November 2006; email
message Elizabeth Colson/Seán Morrow, 20 December 2006.
Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006; interview
with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008; Monica Wilson, ed.,
Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to
1968 (London: Rex Collings; Cape Town: David Philip, 1981), 225–226.
WC, B6.15, E. R. Roux/Monica Hunter, 30 Oct. 1929, Johannesburg.
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the contradiction between what he supposed would be her defence of
the religious qualification at Fort Hare and ‘general liberal principles of
political and religious toleration’.21
On 15 November 1944, she was offered the permanent post, at £400
per annum on the scale ‘for women lecturers’ of £325 rising to £500.
Though Monica suffered like all South African women academics from
pay scales lower than those for men, for the time Fort Hare was relatively
liberal on gender questions. Of the 30 academic staff at Fort Hare for
some or all of the time that she worked there, seven, and the registrar,
were women. This compares with six black staff members during the
same period, none of whom were female.22 Monica stipulated that she
would need ‘to finish certain research work begun by my husband and
myself and not yet complete’, by which she meant their Nyakyusa studies.
She believed she could do this providing her lecturing load was not too
heavy, and that she could soon relinquish the wardenship. The college
agreed, though she never gave up her Eluk post.23 The appointment
helped Monica at a time of great difficulty, but also gave Fort Hare a staff
member on a par with the best of the younger South African and British
social anthropologists. Her academic weight is indicated, for example,
by Isaac Schapera, the doyen of South African-based anthropologists,
agreeing to act as her external examiner.24
Monica had been living at Hogsback with Godfrey since 1941,25 and
then, when he joined the army, by herself with Francis and Timothy,
born 1939 and 1943. The house, according to Francis Wilson, was
little more than a bywoner’s (poor tenant’s) cottage in the grounds of
David and Jessie Hunter’s Hunterstoun estate. There was a drop toilet
eighteen metres away, no running water, and a kitchen floor of polished
dung. From a child’s point of view, the life was idyllic: running barefoot, free and safe with the workers’ children, speaking isiXhosa, eating
monkey meat in a local house, bathing in a zinc tub by the fire, watching
21
22
23
24
25
Ibid., E. R. Roux/Monica Hunter, 9 Aug. 1930. For more on Roux and Monica, see
Chapter 1.
Alexander Kerr, Fort Hare 1915–48: The Evolution of an African College (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1968), 275–277. Women students had been admitted to
Fort Hare from the beginning. For contemporary gender attitudes in a leading South
African university see Bruce K. Murray, Wits, the Early Years: A History of the University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg and Its Precursors 1896–1939 (Johannesburg: Wits
University Press, 1982), 327–334.
University of Fort Hare Staff Files, M. Wilson Personal File, Monica Wilson/Alexander
Kerr, 25 Oct. 1944, Fort Hare; ibid., Alexander Kerr/Monica Wilson, 15 Nov. 1944,
[Fort Hare]. See also Kerr, Fort Hare 1915–48, 253.
WC, uncat. corr., Isaac Schapera, Isaac Schapera/Monica Wilson, 18 Nov. 1946,
Rondebosch, Cape Town.
For Godfrey Wilson’s fraught resignation from the directorship of the RLI before
going to South Africa with Monica, see Richard Brown, ‘Anthropology and Colonial
Rule’.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
199
meals cooking on a wood-burning Welcome Dover range.26 For Monica,
Hogsback and Lovedale would have been saturated in memories of her
husband.27 We glimpse Godfrey at Fort Hare, his striking ideas and personality eclipsing those of Monica in the recollections of Joe Matthews.
He remembered that ‘even when he had joined the army and came in
uniform to visit . . . he and my father . . . would argue from Fort Hare,
across the river, right up to the Hunters’ house at Lovedale, continue
the . . . furious arguments . . . about all kinds of things . . . sit down, have
tea with the Hunters, and back again’. ‘It’s funny’, he said, ‘I knew more
about his views than the views of Monica’.28
Monica started teaching at Fort Hare six weeks after Godfrey’s death.
At the same time she was caring for her two small children, looking
after the Eluk students and negotiating the bureaucratic and financial
aftermath of her husband’s death with the military. She showed a stoical
face to the world. Even within the family, she confronted traumatic facts
directly. Not more than a month after her return from the funeral, 5year-old Francis asked directly about his father’s death. He recalls the
‘rock-like straightness’ with which she answered:
‘I want to know: how did he die?’ And she said, ‘He committed suicide.’
And I said, ‘Yes, well, but how did he do it?’ And Monica didn’t flinch:
she said, ‘He hanged himself.’ So I said, ‘How did he do that?’ She didn’t
flinch: she said, ‘Well, he would have stood up on a chair with a rope around
his neck and kicked the chair away.’29
Rural Hogsback was now partly replaced for the boys by life on the
campus, at times cared for by female students like Gaositwe Chiepe.
In Alice, with a major mission station and its unique ‘Native College’
but otherwise similar to other small South African towns, the Wilson and
Matthews children roamed freely, and the bicycle Mrs Paul Robeson gave
Joe Matthews in 1936 was passed on successively to Francis Wilson, Joe’s
brother Knox, and Tim Wilson.30 Francis collected snails and locusts
for the biology lecturer and explored the laboratory of Professor James
Davidson, who taught physics and mathematics. People like Davidson,
Ellen Radloff, founding Professor of Physiology and a particularly close
friend of Monica’s,31 and Donald Stuart, Professor of English, comprised Monica’s social circle. Godfrey’s death loomed, however. Francis
26
27
28
29
30
31
Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008.
See Seán Morrow, ‘“This is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica
and Godfrey Wilson’ (unpublished paper presented at the Monica Wilson Centenary
Conference, Hogsback, 24–26 June 2008).
Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006.
Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008.
See also Frieda B. Matthews, Remembrances (Bellville: Mayibuye, 1995), 27–28.
http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.AP.PERSON.BM00012
8946&pgs=&cookieSet=1 (accessed 15 October 2008).
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remembers seeing a man coming from Lovedale with a coffin on his head.
For six terrifying hours, until his mother returned, he was convinced she
had died and that the man had come to collect her body: ‘the tenuousness of life . . . if your father can vanish one morning just like that, why
not your mother?’32
Monica coped by measured and unsentimental discipline of herself and
her children. She insisted on her afternoon nap, and Francis ‘learned,
from a very early age, to work within the limits of the time that was
available’. He remembers the pain when he got tar on his legs. She did
what she could, but he stood outside her bedroom window and howled.
‘“There’s nothing more I can do for you”, she said, “I’m having my
rest – go away”.’ She had a tough side, ‘but when she was available she
was totally available’. She was supported by her parents and by Jessie
Hunter’s English housekeeper Miss Harber, ‘Haba’ to the children, who
had lived many years in Alice. Monica and the children went back to
Hogsback whenever time allowed, so there was no sudden break with
the mountain environment and people. She delighted in Hogsback: ‘Oh
perfect joy to be here’, she wrote in the visitors’ book of relatives Kenneth
and Cherrie Houghton on 24 June 1946, signing her family nickname,
‘Moché’.33 Hunterstoun did not belong to Monica until 1949, though;
at this stage, Fort Hare was her home.
Committing to South Africa
Monica might have had a completely different career. She had a strong
sense of the obligations of marriage,34 and it seems that Godfrey had
not wanted to stay in South Africa after the War.35 He was contacted
in November 1943 about a job at the University of Witwatersrand at
the end of hostilities, but was told his wife would never be permanently
appointed. ‘I don’t know whether one could be happy in such a medieval
atmosphere’, he wrote.36 There are hints that Monica was approached
informally a little earlier about the possibility of an official post, perhaps in the Colonial Office.37 In the following month, however, Godfrey
32
33
34
35
36
37
Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008.
Innisfree Visitors’ Book. I am grateful to Mary Leslie for this reference.
WC, Talks and Addresses (partly cat.), talk to National Council for Women, and notes
on ‘Part Time Work for Married Women’, Nov. 1955.
Monica Wilson’s library at Hogsback, uncat. corr. between Monica Wilson and Francis
Wilson, Francis Wilson/Monica Wilson, 11 July 1964, Cambridge: ‘I’m beginning to
see how Daddy just couldn’t live in South Africa.’
WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 24 Nov. 1943, Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte].
WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 19 Sept. 1943, [Egypt]; ibid., Godfrey
Wilson/Monica Wilson, 18 Nov. 1943, Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte]: ‘nice to
have people seeking you out; very nice’, Godfrey wrote.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
201
reacted enthusiastically to a letter Monica had received from Professor
John Hutton, sounding the Wilsons out for jobs at Cambridge. ‘The prospect of working with you in Cambridge,’ Godfrey wrote, ‘is excessively
alluring’. ‘I think we have a good chance of getting it’, he wrote later.38
She would have accompanied him to England, working with him on the
Nyakyusa material. It might have been one of the great British social
science partnerships, rivalling the Webbs or Hammonds.
Even after being widowed, if she had gone to Britain or America she
might have become still more of a leading figure in metropolitan anthropology than she did.39 Difficult though it would have been to relocate
during or immediately after the War, she had at least three opportunities. There had been a possibility of employment at Makerere University
in Uganda that she and Godfrey had been considering in 1943–1944,
which she might have revived.40 Max Gluckman, writing to Alexander
Kerr from the RLI in the immediate aftermath of Godfrey’s death –
‘he was a most brilliant man and as I know full well, a generous and
loyal friend’ – said that the Institute had just received a large Colonial
Office grant and ‘if she can find nothing else to do she might return to
do research here’.41 In June 1946, Evans-Pritchard wrote from Cambridge that there were now more anthropological jobs than could be
filled. He urged her, ‘as one of the very few first class Social Anthropologists in the British Empire today’, to consider applying for the post
he would vacate when he moved to the Oxford Chair. He had heard,
though, that she would not leave South Africa: ‘Is this so?’42 Audrey
Richards also told Monica that the Cambridge readership would be ‘hers
for the asking’, adding with characteristic humanity, and as a single person herself, ‘do things get any better or is the loneliness worse in some
ways? . . . I feel it as I never did, and yet it is not the loneliness of missing
which is so much worse’.43 Though Monica was pursuing the option
38
39
40
41
42
43
WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 8 Dec. [1943], Military College [Voortrekkerhoogte]; ibid., Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 10 Dec. 1943, Military College
[Voortrekkerhoogte].
Interview with John and Jean Comaroff, Gardens, Cape Town, 4 September 2007.
WC, B4.13, Principal Makerere [Turner]/Dr Monica Hunter [sic], 23 Dec. 1943,
Makerere, and subsequent exchanges.
University of Fort Hare Staff Files, M. Wilson Personal File, Max Gluckman/Alexander
Kerr, 30 May 1944, Livingstone. Monica was with Godfrey in Northern Rhodesia from
1938 to 1941, when he was first director of the RLI and Gluckman assistant anthropologist. Ties continued with Gluckman during his succeeding directorship and thereafter.
See Monica Wilson, ‘The First Three Years, 1938–41’, African Social Research, 24
(1977), 279–283.
WC, B6.5, E. E. Evans-Pritchard/Monica Wilson, 4 June 1946, Cambridge.
WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 25 June 1946, London. When Monica
had already left Fort Hare, Audrey Richards suggested she might apply for her readership at the London School of Economics when she moved to the East African Institute of Social Research (EAISR), of which she was founding director, at Makerere:
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of Rhodes University College, she also applied for the Cambridge job,
recruiting her in-laws to investigate the price of houses and domestic help
in postwar Britain.44 ‘[O]nly your sex could bar you!’ Audrey Richards
wrote.45
Yet Monica withdrew her application, ostensibly because of inadequate
remuneration since the job was finally offered only as a lectureship,46
and Evans-Pritchard wrote a testimonial supporting her application for
the chair of social anthropology at Rhodes. She was, he said, scattering
capitals, ‘one of the leading Social Anthropologists of today, both as a
Fieldworker and as a Theoretical Thinker’. Rhodes would be lucky to
get her.47 Fort Hare was, therefore, a transition not to Cambridge but to
Rhodes, and thence to the University of Cape Town.
This was a decisive move in Monica’s life and work, and separates her
from the many other South Africans such as Gluckman, the Kupers, the
Comaroffs, and even Schapera late in his career, who opted for Britain or
America. In the end, her decision seems to have been as much political
and social as academic. She felt grounded in and committed to South
Africa and, though she devoted herself to completing her and Godfrey’s
study of the Nyakyusa, with the last monograph appearing as late as
44
45
46
47
‘Let me know if you are remotely interested.’ It seems she was not (WC, BC880,
B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 25 March 1949, London). Later still, when
Richards was leaving Uganda she wrote that Monica was the only person to whom
she would willingly hand over her ‘precious child’. Monica replied that the suggestion
was attractive, ‘[b]ut Audrey I don’t want to be in a different country from my boys at
present’. She had no siblings to substitute for her ‘and I wouldn’t want them to anyway’
(WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 6 June 1954, Makerere); ibid., [Monica
Wilson]/Audrey Richards, n.d., n.p. [draft attached to Richards’s letter]. For Richards
and the EAISR see David Mills, ‘How Not to Be a “Government House Pet”: Audrey
Richards and the East African Institute for Social Research’ in Mwenda Ntarangwi,
David Mills and Muftafa Babiker, eds, African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2006), 76–98.
WC, B5.6, Prof. and Mrs John Dover-Wilson/Monica Wilson, 15/16 July 1946, Balerno;
John Dover-Wilson and Audrey [Lawson]/Monica Wilson, 21 July 1946, Balerno. The
servant situation would improve, thought Mrs Wilson, when men were demobilised,
‘and women go back to their homes’.
WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 11 July 1946, Co. Donegal, Ireland, as
from London. Richards, the obvious candidate, had herself been barred by her sex from
directorship of the RLI. She wrote to Godfrey: ‘You know I wanted that job and had
been promised it, but at the last moment Hubert [Hubert Young, governor of Northern
Rhodesia] told me his financial backers wouldn’t stand for a woman.’ She added, ‘I do
hope you get it because it would be fun . . . starting anything new is a real chance which
I envy you’ (WC, B4.7, Audrey Richards/Godfrey Wilson, 3 Sept. 1937, Pralognan,
Haute-Savoie).
WC, B6.20, Monica Wilson/Prof. J. H. Hutton, [c. July 1946], [Alice]; WC, B5.6, John
Dover-Wilson and Audrey [Lawson]/Monica Wilson, 21 July 1946, Balerno.
WC, B6.5, E. E. Evans-Pritchard/[Registrar] Rhodes University College, 25 June 1946,
Cambridge. Evans-Pritchard signed himself ‘Reader in Anthropology at Cambridge
and Professor of Social Anthropology (elect) at Oxford’. Audrey Richards also wrote
an enthusiastic reference (WC, B6.14, Audrey Richards/[Registrar, Rhodes University
College], 15 June 1946, London).
‘Your Intellectual Son’
203
1977,48 from the mid-1940s her new work was for the most part on
South Africa. Notable were the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, the urban
sociology of Langa, the increasingly historical work epitomised in the
Oxford History of South Africa and her work on the autobiography of Z. K.
Matthews.49 Fort Hare was pivotal to this, representing and reinforcing
the choice for, and vision of, a South Africa in the liberal Christian
tradition of Lovedale. Criticising inconsistent liberals as much as the
openly racist thinking of those in power, she affirmed this tradition at the
opening of the Missionary Museum in King William’s Town in 1976.
She wrote to Audrey Richards that ‘most whites looked puzzled’ at her
address and that John Brownlee’s descendants, celebrating the 150th
anniversary of his mission station, ‘looked much more conservative than
he was when he arrived in 1818’.50
Teaching and Students
Monica came in 1944 to a Fort Hare where, in spite of challenges,
Christian, liberal, paternalistic African higher education still seemed to
hold firm and where black social and economic advance did not yet seem
completely obstructed.51 It was a short period of apparent equilibrium,
even optimism. However, this appearance masked deep-seated tensions
and was soon to disintegrate.
In the 1940s, Fort Hare was a conservative and hierarchical institution.
It also encapsulated the aspirations, discontents and frustrations of the
growing South and even southern African black elite. It was a college
where Gaositwe Chiepe – a forceful young woman who studied zoology
and botany, became SRC (Student Representative Council) secretary
and went on to a prominent administrative and political career in Botswana – could be asked by the chemistry professor’s wife, ‘Why are you
wasting your time instead of doing home economics?’52 Resentment at
paternalism broke out in protests over food quality and the prohibition
48
49
50
51
52
Monica’s works on the Nyakyusa are listed in Chapter 4 in this volume.
Of books alone, she was the editor and author, with others, of vol. 3, Social Structure
and vol. 4, Land Tenure of the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter
and Shooter, 1952); with Archie Mafeje she wrote Langa: A Study of Social Groups in
an African Township (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963); edited with Leonard
Thompson (and substantially wrote) The Oxford History of South Africa, vols 1 and 2
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 and 1971), and edited and partly wrote Freedom
for My People. She also wrote Religion and the Transformation of Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971).
Monica Wilson, ‘Missionaries: Conquerors or Servants of God?’ (King William’s
Town: South African Missionary Museum, 1976); London School of Economics
Archives/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 28 Feb. 1976, Hogsback.
For the national context see Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves, eds, South Africa’s 1940s:
Worlds of Possibilities (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005).
Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006.
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of dancing, and in events such as the 1941 student strike over an alleged
assault on a kitchen worker by the dining hall boarding master, and a 1942
class boycott precipitated by a ban on Sunday tennis. It may have masked
a deeper sense of alienation.53 The tone had already sharpened in the
1930s. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was one focus of protest,54 and
laws such as those ending African voting rights in the Cape and limiting
African residence in towns another. As Monica wrote in May 1937, ‘anti
European feeling is increasing fast. Fort Hare feels more electric than
ever’.55 Earlier students, such as Govan Mbeki and I. B. Tabata, had
developed wider political agendas and the moderate All African Convention, which in 1943–4 incubated the radical Non-European Unity
Movement, had a student following.56
Discontent was too dispersed and disconnected, however, to generate
a sustained critique of the institution. This came with the foundation of
the Fort Hare branch of the ANC Youth League in 1948, after Monica’s
departure from the college.57 Robert Sobukwe, ‘a man of influence
among his fellows’, as Principal Clifford Dent wrote on 2 November
1949, had yet to arrive on campus,58 although Monica would recall that,
already in her time, Z. K. Matthews was being ‘sniped at’ as a ‘stooge’
by some campus radicals.59 At Monica’s Fort Hare, most though not
all students still tended to seek improvement within the existing system.
The stories of some of Monica’s Fort Hare student ‘significant others’
illustrate her academic and pastoral roles at the college.
Gaositwe Chiepe (see Figure 6.2) was one of Monica’s charges in Eluk.
She remembers Monica as ‘firm, a disciplinarian, but very tender . . . she
respected people, and you just felt you loved her, and didn’t want to
do anything that would displease her’. When she and her friend Pauline Masinyane ‘had one penny between us . . . we went to town to buy
penny fish-bones . . . put in salted flour and fried . . . So we came back
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
For student radicalism at Fort Hare see Daniel Massey, Under Protest: The Rise of
Student Resistance at the University of Fort Hare (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010), esp.
35–40. Nelson Mandela, a Fort Hare student at the time, refused to sit on the Students’
Representative Council in protest against the poor quality of dining hall food. For
food as an issue in mission schools, see Jonathan Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle: Policy
and Resistance in South Africa 1940–1990 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press,
1999), 15–17.
Massey, Under Protest, 34–35.
WC, B1, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 10 May 1937, Lovedale.
For Govan Mbeki at Fort Hare see Massey, Under Protest, 30–34. Isaac Tabata was a
student from 1930 to 1933: University of Fort Hare Student Records, Alice, Tabata, I.
B. For Tabata, see Ciraj Shahid Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History
in South Africa’, Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2004.
Massey, Under Protest, 42–44. The Youth League was founded in Johannesburg in 1944
and expanded substantially under A. P. Mda from 1948.
Alice, University of Fort Hare Student Files, Sobukwe, R. M.
Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, 228.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
205
Figure 6.2. Monica and the House Committee of the women’s residence Elukhanyisweni (Place of Enlightenment) at Fort Hare Native College, 1946. The other
women who appear in the photograph are, from left to right, Gaositwe Chiepe,
Jeanette Sello, Violet Nikani, Beatrice Ntloko and Eunice Kuzwayo.60
and . . . were happily tucking into the fish-bones when lo and behold the
door opened with a knock and there was Monica Wilson. We froze. She
looked at us and she said, ‘I like fish too but I don’t eat it in my bedroom.
You know it shouldn’t be here.’ We apologised. It showed that . . . kind
words, or simple words, are more effective, more corrective, than crescendos of indignation.’ 61 Compare this nostalgic reflection with Monica’s
recollection of being a Fort Hare warden. She felt that where racial isolation is the rule, discipline is often difficult because ‘the enforcement of
any rules (whether by whites or Africans) tends to be regarded as “persecution”’. Such institutions ‘are liable to become the cradels [sic] of
exclusive nationalisms’.62
Gaositwe and Pauline looked after Francis and Timothy ‘when she
perhaps wanted to be quiet and alone, or when she was doing something else at work’. At bath time ‘I’ll tell your Mummy that you were
splashing’ was enough to quell the brothers.63 Gaositwe often stayed with
60
61
62
63
WC, N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups.
Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006.
WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 1 (partly cat.), Monica Wilson, ‘South African Universities and the Colour Bar’, n.d. [but c. 1959].
Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. Also WC, uncat.
corr., Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaositwe Chiepe/Monica Wilson, 22 Sept. 1975, Gaborone.
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Monica at Hogsback during the holidays instead of returning home to
Bechuanaland. At the time this was unusual and, to many whites, unacceptable: ‘It was like being at home . . . like being, perhaps, the senior
member of the family . . . and doing the chores happily, and everybody
being happy.’ This family, however, was haunted by Godfrey’s death.
Monica never talked about it, though it was clear that it had profoundly
affected her, ‘and this is what drew me to her’. She was vulnerable, Gaositwe thought, ‘but being the woman she was, she was determined not to
go under, and to fight it – and the children must not suffer because of
that’.64
Monica’s concern for her Fort Hare students did not end when she
left the college. In 1954, at UCT, she pushed for the Oxford Bantu
Scholarship Trust scholarship, intended primarily for a woman, to be
awarded to Gaositwe who was now an education officer at Serowe in
Bechuanaland. She was an ‘outstanding student’, Monica wrote to the
UCT vice-chancellor.65 She lobbied Z. K. Matthews to write on Gaositwe’s behalf and was herself a referee, writing that so strongly did she feel
that she was ‘an eminently suitable candidate for the scholarship’ that she
had sent her an application form ‘though she is not connected with us
here’. She considered her a woman of complete integrity, with notable
powers of leadership, and thought she would ‘hold her own without difficulty in any women’s college in Oxford or Cambridge’.66 The scholarship
was awarded to a man.67
Gaositwe Chiepe saw Monica as warden, widowed mother of two small
children and supportive professional. For Livingstone Mqotsi, a political nonconformist from an early age, Monica was teacher and intellectual influence. Alienated by the atmosphere at the St Barnabas Anglican
Primary School in his Keiskammahoek home, as a young man he refused
to go to one of the prominent mission schools. Instead, to his father’s
chagrin, in 1939 he went to stay with a sister in Port Elizabeth and
attended the mainly coloured Paterson Technical High School as a day
scholar. There he became interested in music and began to play the
violin, mixing with fellow-student Dennis Brutus and his circle. Though
he qualified for Fort Hare in 1943, he mistrusted what he took to be its
cloying missionary atmosphere. However, he eventually abandoned his
64
65
66
67
Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006.
WC, uncat. corr., Gaositwe Chiepe, Monica Wilson/T. B. Davie, 12 May 1954
[Rondebosch, Cape Town].
Ibid., Gaositwe Chiepe/Monica Wilson Reference for Gaositwe Chiepe for Oxford scholarship, 18 May 1954.
Ibid., Z. K. Matthews, Z. K. Matthews/Monica Wilson, 15 May 1954, Alice; interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006. This was an instance of
wider marginalising of women: see, for example, their absence among the male research
assistants in Lyn Schumaker’s Africanizing Anthropology.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
207
musical ambitions and went to the college in 1945, supported throughout
his Fort Hare career by Mr E. M. Holland of Port Elizabeth.68
At Fort Hare, Mqotsi met Monica and got ‘terribly interested in social
anthropology: it gripped my imagination’. He believed she was an incomparable teacher for those willing to engage with her intellectually. She
respected any seriously argued and well-supported viewpoint: ‘whatever
she said, in matters of theory, was not a final statement – it was a suggestion – “I suggest that these things correspond”, “I suggest to you that
this is . . . ”. And then of course it was an attempt to get you to look at
whatever the problem was, to judge it . . . from all angles. And to examine her own statements as well’. She made no concessions to intellectual
laziness:
a lot of people . . . had curious ideas about social anthropology. They
thought it was an easy subject, because it was about them. And they thought
they knew what their life was, and what their institutions were. But when
Monica Wilson started talking about the functions of institutions, that was
a different matter . . . What stimulated me really . . . was the requirement
that you should look at your social institutions from an objective standpoint, and it was no use saying . . . ‘I know these customs’, which was the
attitude of a number of friends.69
She argued vigorously with Mqotsi about his Marxist views, an approach
he thought alien to Z. K. Matthews whom he found ‘superficial’, teaching
from notes which he would get students to read out if he was unable to
attend class. Matthews’s style, Mqotsi thought, was that of a high school
teacher rather than a university lecturer.70 Monica arranged for him to
move straight into social anthropology, normally studied only in second
and third years, and he completed all available courses during Monica’s
time at Fort Hare.
Mqotsi’s intense involvement with social anthropology led him, on his
own initiative and with Monica’s support, to study a separatist Church in
68
69
70
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007. See also WC, uncat.
corr., L. Mqotsi, Mr. L. M. Mqotsi, curriculum vitae, enclosed in L. Mqotsi/Monica
Wilson, 10 Aug. 1965, Lusaka. For Holland, see University of Fort Hare, Student
Files, Mqotsi, L. Chapter 7 in this volume deals more fully with Mqotsi’s fieldwork and
texts; this section of this chapter looks at his relationship with Monica in a particular
institutional context.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007.
Others found Z. K. ‘an exceedingly good teacher’, as Monica Wilson notes. See Monica
Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, 115–116. However, Hilda Kuper, as external examiner, was ‘very disturbed’ by the standard of Fort Hare anthropology examination papers
in 1954: ‘they gave me the impression of most slip-shod teaching’ (WC, uncat. corr.,
Hilda Kuper, Hilda Kuper/Monica Wilson, 25 Jan. 1954, Durban), maybe fulfilling
Monica’s 1937 foreboding that Matthews could have ‘enormous scope’ academically
but she was afraid ‘he will diffuse his energy in lots of outside things and do nothing
very well’ (WC, B1, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Wilson, 22 May 1937, Lovedale).
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Inside African Anthropology
Port Elizabeth with his friend Nimrod Mkele. Mkele had been at Paterson High School with Mqotsi, followed by a tumultuous personal life and
career at Fort Hare, where he was suspended in 1943 after accusations of
involvement in student agitation. Following an acrimonious correspondence, he was readmitted only when he apologised the following year.71
Using the prominence of Mqotsi’s brother-in-law in the Church as an
entry point, the friends did fieldwork during the holidays and later wrote
an article which Monica sent to African Studies. This substantial study,
a most unusual achievement for two black – or any – undergraduates
in South Africa at the time, was published in June 1946.72 Mqotsi said
that Alexander Kerr actively discouraged him from undertaking such
research, arguing that it was a distraction from the teaching career upon
which he should focus. The contemporary record confirms this, though
it seems that Kerr eventually relented and forwarded his application for
a bursary, which he obtained, to the Bureau for Social Research.73
If Monica had remained at Fort Hare, she would have supervised
Mqotsi’s MA. Instead, she left for Rhodes and Mqotsi embarked on a
career of many frustrations and eventual exile in Zambia and England,
where he became deputy principal of Thetford Secondary School in
Norfolk. Monica wrote references for him for the RLI and elsewhere,
and advised him on his subsequent studies, but hostility to his Unity
Movement politics blocked him repeatedly.74
Her loyalty to Mqotsi is notable because Monica thought him a considerably less capable student than Godfrey Pitje.75 Pitje is best known
as an important figure in the ANC Youth League at Fort Hare in the
late 1940s, and later as the legal partner of Tambo and Mandela and
founder of the Black Lawyers Association.76 He graduated from Fort
71
72
73
74
75
76
University of Fort Hare Student Files, Mkele, N., Principal/N. Mkele, 9 Feb. 1943, Fort
Hare; ibid., N. Mkele/Registrar SANC, 13 July 1944, Johannesburg, and other corr.
Livingstone Mqotsi and Nimrod Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church: iBandla lika-Krestu’,
African Studies, 5, 2 (1946), 106–142.
WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, L. Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 21 June 1947, New
Brighton; ibid., Livingstone Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 3 Feb. 1948, New Brighton.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007. See also correspondence Monica Wilson and Mqotsi from 1947 to 1980 in WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone
Mqotsi. ‘Like most exiles’, she says in a 1980 reference, ‘I think he has suffered much’
(Monica Wilson/Chair, Postgraduate Studies, Univ. of Warwick, 28 July 1980, Hogsback). Some of Mqotsi’s difficulties are described in ibid., L. Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 1
July 1954, Nqamakhwe, where he notes his summary dismissal after nine months from
his research post at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) ‘on the
ground that I was politically persona non grata with the mines where the bulk of our work
has to be done’.
WC, uncat. corr., Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Monica Wilson/Secretary RLI, 27 July
1950, [Grahamstown].
K. S. Broun, Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South African Law (Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), Chapter 1: ‘Godfrey Mokgomane Pitje: Teacher,
Scholar, Attorney, Father’; Gail M. Gerhart and Thomas Karis, eds, From Protest to
‘Your Intellectual Son’
209
Hare with anthropology as a major in 1944, the year Monica began to
teach there. He came, he said, ‘under the strong influence’ of Monica,
who was ‘obviously more learned in the subject than Z. K.’ He taught at
Orlando High School in 1945, where his already strong political interests
intensified through contact with activist senior students. With Monica’s
encouragement, he enrolled for honours in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. When his teacher Hilda Kuper left at the end
of 1946, replaced by the ex-colonial civil servant Mervyn Jeffreys,77 he
abandoned the degree and returned to Fort Hare to study for an MA in
anthropology.78 At this stage he was ‘not a formal member of any political group, but . . . was restless and itching to find a political home’. At
Fort Hare, Pitje was once more in the domain of Z. K. Matthews, who
was ‘very, very moderate’ but exposed his students to the realities around
them ‘just through an exposition of his subjects’. Matthews encouraged
him to start an ANC Youth League branch at the college.79
Monica considered Pitje a first-rate ethnographic fieldworker, though
lacking in analytical ability.80 She was implacable on questions of academic quality and, while giving full credit to her students’ abilities and
achievements, did not allow wishful thinking and what would later be
called political correctness to cloud her judgement. It was her sense,
later, that in Archie Mafeje she had a first-class student that made him
so important to her.81 She did not regard either Mqotsi or Pitje in this
way. While she had left Fort Hare by the time Pitje was doing his MA
under Matthews, she helped him greatly from Rhodes. He ‘had to travel
between Rhodes and Fort Hare’, and asked her directly what he should do
when her advice clashed with that of Matthews.82 Thus his postgraduate
77
78
79
80
81
82
Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964, vol.
4: Political Profiles, 1882–1964 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1977), 127;
P. M. Mojapelo, ‘Profile: Dr Godfrey Mokgonane Pitje – a Vital Cog in the Liberation Struggle’, African Law Review (Bumper Issue), (1988), 4–8. http://www.bla.org.za/
uploads/newsletter/TRIBUTE TO OUR FIRST PRESIDENT DR G M PITJE.pdf
(accessed 1 March 2011).
For Jeffreys, see Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 202–203.
University of Fort Hare Staff Files, G. M. Pitje, South African Native College, Form of
Application for Staff Appointment (of Museum Sub-Curator), signed by Pitje 10 Oct.
1947.
University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIRR: Oral History Programme,
Transcripts, AD 1722/1, transcript 3: Interview by A. Manson with G. M. Pitje, Johannesburg, 28 Jan. 1982.
WC, uncat. corr., tests, misc., MW reference for G. M. Pitje, 14 Feb. 1950, Grahamstown; ibid., Max Gluckman, draft letter Monica Wilson/Daryll Forde, n.d. [but late
1946], n.p.
See Chapter 8.
University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIRR: Oral History Programme,
Transcripts, AD 1722/1, transcript 3: Interview by A. Manson with G. M. Pitje,
Johannesburg, 28 Jan. 1982; WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica
Wilson, 25 Sept. 1948, Fort Hare.
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Inside African Anthropology
studies, formally under Matthews but in fact substantially under Monica,
parallelled his political work, where Matthews was the inspiration and
A. P. Mda encouraged him from outside the college.83 T. R. H. White’s
claim that Pitje and Matthews ‘were hardly on speaking terms’ seems
exaggerated.84 When Pitje’s MA was accepted, he told Monica that she
had been his ‘inspiration’ and thanked her for supervising his fieldwork
and for her attempts to find work for him at the RLI.85 Monica’s role
was formally recognised by Fort Hare: she wrote to the secretary of
the National Council for Social Research saying that Godfrey Pitje ‘has
been a very diligent and . . . successful field worker’ and that the college
principal had asked her to report on Pitje’s research ‘which I have been
supervising’.86
Pitje’s MA thesis was on male education among the Pedi, his own
ethnic group. African Studies, the leading contemporary South African
journal in its field, thought the work sufficiently important to publish as
a three-part article.87 The study reveals him as a capable and sensitive
fieldworker who in other circumstances might have had a solid academic
career ahead of him. Monica cited it in her work, as have subsequent
scholars.88 The section in the thesis on ‘Sex Education’ was not published
in African Studies, but appeared in the International Journal of Sexology, a
journal in the tradition of Magnus Hirschfeld, Alfred Kinsey and others,
edited from Bombay by A. P. Pillay from 1947 to 1955.89
Pitje had a limited range of published material with which to work.
The 19 references in the published article were probably those he
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
For Pitje’s political work at Fort Hare, see Donovan Williams, A History of the University
College of Fort Hare, South Africa: The 1950s (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001),
34–35, 38–43; D. E. Burchell, ‘The Emergence and Growth of Student Militancy at
the University College of Fort Hare in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of the University
of Durban-Westville, 3 (1986), 149–167; Benjamin Pogrund, How Can Man Die Better:
The Life of Robert Sobukwe (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2006 (1990)),
28–30.
T. R. H. White, ‘Z. K. Matthews and the Formation of the ANC Youth League at the
University of Fort Hare’, Kleio, 27 (1995), 136.
WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 26 Jan. 1949, Fort Hare.
University of Fort Hare Student Files: G. M. Pitje, Monica Wilson/Secretary to the
National Council for Social Research, 11 Sept. 1947, Grahamstown.
Godfrey M. Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems of Male Education amongst the
Pedi and Cognate Tribes’ (MA thesis, University of South Africa, 1948); G. M. Pitje,
‘Traditional Systems of Male Education Among Pedi and Cognate Tribes’, part 1,
African Studies, 9, 2 (1950), 53–76; part 2, African Studies, 9, 3 (1950), 105–124; part
3, African Studies, 9, 4 (1950), 194–201.
As in Monica Wilson, Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London, New York and
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1957), 231. See also, for instance, references in Peter
Delius, A Lion amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal
(Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996).
Godfrey M. Pitje, ‘Sex Education among the Pedi’, International Journal of Sexology, 4
(1951), 212–216; for Pillay see S. Devadas Pillai, Indian Sociology through Ghurye: A
Dictionary (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1977), 166.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
211
considered particularly significant from the 86 in his thesis.90 He cited
works by two ethnographer educationists, sons of Berlin Missionary Society missionaries, and both important apartheid educational bureaucrats:
Werner Eiselen, chair of the commission that shaped Bantu Education,
and Gottfried Franz, whose work emphasised traditional Pedi values and
education.91 Other citations included publications of Native Commissioner Major Donald Hunt and the ‘renegade’ founder of the Lutheran
Bapedi Church, Johannes Winter.92 Surprisingly, neither in the article
nor the thesis did he cite Monica’s Reaction to Conquest, which includes
material that seems to have comparative importance, though in the thesis
he did mention Eileen and Jack Krige and Isaac Schapera. Nor did he
cite Lucy Mair, the anthropologist of the time most directly interested
in education, nor Malinowski himself – who, in the 1930s, particularly
at the 1934 New Education Fellowship conference in South Africa, also
turned his attention to education.93 Neither, outside anthropology, does
he appear to have read the important work of Victor Murray.94
Two elements in the thesis were not included in the article. First,
in the introduction Pitje discussed what came to be known as ‘insider
anthropology’, an approach which some of Monica’s work comes close
to exemplifying. In spite of the obvious advantages of linguistic and cultural familiarity, he met with suspicion from ‘pagans’ for being different to
themselves, and from Christians for fraternising with pagans. His mother
urged him not to risk poisoning by eating with strangers, a necessity in
90
91
92
93
94
Pitje, ‘Traditional Systems’, part 3, 200–201; Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems’,
153–157.
Cynthia Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria:
UNISA Press, 2010); http://esaach.org.za/index.php?title=Franz, Gottfried Heinrich
(accessed 20 September 2011).
For Hunt see references in Delius, A Lion; for Winter, see Peter Delius and Kirsten
Rüther, ‘J.A. Winter – Visionary or Mercenary? A Missionary Life in Colonial Context’,
South African Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2010), 303–324. Winter as ‘renegade’ is in Peter
Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the NineteenthCentury Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press and London: Heinemann, 1983), 20.
See, for instance, Lucy Mair, Native Policies in Africa (London: Routledge, 1936);
Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review
of Missions, 25 (1936), 480–515. See Peter Kallaway’s work in this area, especially
‘Science Policy: Anthropology and Education in British Colonial Africa during the
Inter-war Years’, forthcoming in Paedogogica Historica; also his ‘Education, Health and
Social Welfare in the Late Colonial Context: The International Missionary Council and
Educational Transition in the Interwar Years with Specific Reference to Colonial Africa’,
History of Education, 38, 2 (2009), 217–246; ‘Welfare and Education in British Colonial
African and South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s’, Paedogogica Historica, 41, 3
(2005), 337–356; ‘Conference Litmus: The Development of a Conference and Policy
Culture in the Interwar Period with Special Reference to the New Education Fellowship
and British Colonial Education in Southern Africa’ in Kim Tolley, ed., Transformations
in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 123–149.
A. Victor Murray, The School in the Bush: A Critical Study of the Theory and Practice of
Native Education in Africa (London: Longmans Green, 1929).
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Inside African Anthropology
fieldwork. Belief in witchcraft, easy to dismiss in the educated circles in
which he normally mixed, was ubiquitous. Mostly, he maintained the
dispassionate tone characteristic of academic writing. Once, in the context of witchcraft, the stresses of field research can be glimpsed through
his orderly text: ‘Pedi teachers and ministers are not immune, and it
was not an easy matter for one to maintain one’s balance of mind in
the face of these suggestions.’95 The difficulties of field research for an
African student at the time are apparent in his Fort Hare student file.
He asks for a letter to protect him against police harassment96 and writes
anxiously about the impossibility of responding to demands for receipts,
for example, for travels by donkey cart and purchases of traditional beer
for informants.97
Second, the three chapters on modern education and its effects were
omitted, making the published article read entirely in the ethnographic
present. Pitje echoed The Analysis of Social Change, using the concept of
‘social maladjustment or disequilibrium’. Concluding, Pitje pictured the
Pedi boy ‘with his one leg in town and another in the Reserves’. Traditional education was conservative but appropriate; modern education
was imposed from outside and too theoretical. The future depended on
a more relevant modern education that should take account of the traditional system.98 This humdrum conclusion suggests that Monica was
correct in thinking that Pitje’s strengths lay more in fieldwork than in
interpretation. Nevertheless, it is surprising that Monica, who was well
aware of the educational literature and, for example, knew Lucy Mair
and Victor Murray personally, does not appear to have directed Pitje to
this literature, or if she did, that he did not appear to pay attention to it.
Ethnographically detailed, his study does not engage with contemporary
educational thinking. This was the end of Pitje’s published work in the
field of anthropology. He later published short pieces on education and
on the pass laws.99
The connection between Pitje and Monica was not limited to the
supervision of his thesis. Two episodes relating to research posts for
which he applied suggest the atmosphere of colonial southern Africa.
In October 1946, Max Gluckman, who succeeded Godfrey Wilson as
director of the RLI, asked Monica if she knew of African students who
95
96
97
98
99
Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems’, viii, and see in general i–xvi.
University of Fort Hare Student Files: G. M. Pitje, Pitje/Alexander Kerr, 13 Jan. 1947,
Middelburg.
Ibid., Pitje/Miss B. D. Took, 26 May 1947, Middelburg; ibid., Pitje/Bursar, Fort Hare,
14 June 1947, Middelburg; ibid., Pitje, memorandum on ‘Expenditure’, 17 June 1947.
Pitje, ‘Traditional and Modern Systems’, 142, 150.
Somarsundarum Cooppan, Godfrey M. Pitje and Richard E. van der Ross, Four Essays
on Education (Wynberg: Teachers’ Educational and Professional Association, 1959);
Godfrey M. Pitje, ‘The Effect of Pass Laws on African Life’, Address to South African
Institute of Race Relations Council meetings, 1961, Cape Town: SAIRR, 1961.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
213
could work for the International African Institute’s Ethnographic Survey
of Africa.100 Monica recommended Pitje, along with Tennyson Hlabangana from Southern Rhodesia, writing that their cultural backgrounds
and command of an African language made them ‘less likely to make
mistakes in interpretation than all but the most experienced European
students’. Embarrassed, Gluckman replied, asking if Pitje would be prepared to live in ‘a poor hut’, isolated from most Europeans apart from the
Gluckmans and a few others who would welcome him to their homes.
He would ‘ask Government whether they object to an African working
on the survey and possibly using the files’.101
Nothing came of the Ethnographic Survey initiative, though it reveals
the racism saturating the Central African colonies at the time. In 1950
Pitje applied for a post at the Institute as a fieldworker on the Copperbelt
with Clyde Mitchell, leading to an episode that shocked Monica at the
time and is no less shocking today. Monica wrote a reference for him,
saying that he was ‘extremely well fitted’ for the post: ‘[h]e would be
able to live in a Compound as a white anthropologist can not do, and
he would express the point of view on the inter-racial situation which no
white person, however sympathetic, can express’. His limitations in terms
of organising and presenting material were more than compensated for
by his excellent fieldwork.102
On 18 August, David Rheinallt Jones, founder of the South African
Institute of Race Relations and the doyen of establishment liberalism,
wrote to Monica on behalf of the RLI trustees ‘to ascertain the political
and racial attitudes of certain Africans’ who had applied for research
posts under the institute. He asked her if Pitje, specifically, ‘could be
relied upon to be discreet in his conduct in respect of political and other
controversial issues’, and he attached a list of all applicants in case she
could give information on any or all of them, as well as the names of their
referees.103
We do not have a record of Monica’s direct response to this request
but Max Gluckman, now in Manchester, wrote to her on 28 September
saying Pitje had told him that he had not been appointed: ‘It is pretty
sickening that no African who does not thank the Whites for kicking
him around is going to get appointed . . . when it comes to condemning
blacks on the South African police reports without protest then I think we
have come to the edge.’104 He wrote later that ‘I feel like you disgusted’
100
101
102
103
104
WC, uncat. corr., Max Gluckman, Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 26 Oct. 1946,
Livingstone.
Ibid., Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 4 Jan. 1947, Livingstone.
Ibid., Godfrey Pitje, Monica Wilson/Sec., Inter-University Committee for Higher Education in the Colonies, Toronto, n.d.
Ibid., J. D. Rheinallt Jones/Monica Wilson, ‘Confidential’, 18 Aug. 1950, Johannesburg.
Ibid., Max Gluckman, Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 28 Sept. 1950, Manchester.
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Inside African Anthropology
by the affair, and that he could not ‘add anything to your indignant
comments’.105 Monica wrote directly to Pitje that she was ‘very sorry
indeed’ that he had not got one of the RLI posts: ‘I thought you should
have got one of the jobs there and said so repeatedly.’106 Later, contacting
Monica once more for a reference for Godfrey who wanted to apply for
a research assistantship at Manchester, Gluckman perspicaciously asked
whether it was worth Pitje’s while to continue with anthropology after
what had happened over the RLI.107
Though with an MA and publications on which Monica had given
him substantial advice,108 Pitje was eventually obliged to return to school
teaching, becoming principal from 1952 of Jane Furze combined primary
and secondary school in his native Sekhukuneland, where he found
his duties ‘so taxing that I do not have much time in which to read
anthropology’.109 Even in this field, difficulties about which he probably
never knew were put in his way. In 1950 the then Fort Hare principal,
Clifford Dent, wrote damningly of Pitje as a political agitator when the
inspector of Native Education at Krugersdorp requested a confidential
report in relation to Pitje’s application for principalship of a large Witwatersrand primary school.110 Nevertheless, he tried repeatedly to return
to academia and Monica wrote many references for him.111 In 1952 he
proposed registering as her doctoral student at UCT. Monica said she
would accept him, but advised him not to come: ‘I would feel extremely
unhappy if you spent your savings on two years’ work and then did not
get the degree in the end, and I am not sufficiently confident that you
can make it to encourage you to go on. I am afraid you will take this
hard, but I do feel that I should tell you my opinion . . . I have found
it very difficult to write this letter.’112 In 1954 Pitje was accepted for
a position at Rhodes, where he would have worked towards his Ph.D.
However, Oliver Tambo, asking ‘how long can you last at Rhodes before
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
Ibid., Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 12 Dec. 1950, Manchester.
Ibid., Godfrey Pitje, Monica Wilson/Godfrey Pitje, 1 Dec. 1950, n.p.
Ibid., Max Gluckman, Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 16 July 1951, Manchester.
Ibid., Godfrey Pitje, Monica Wilson, ‘Points for Pitje for publication’, n.d. [1949].
Ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 28 April 1952, Jane Furze.
University of Fort Hare Staff Files: G. M. Pitje, G. A. McDonald, Inspector of Native Education/Principal, SANC, 30 June 1950, Krugersdorp; Clifford Dent/G. A.
McDonald, Fort Hare.
Wits Historical Papers, Kb5.27 (file 2), SAIIR: Education: Bursaries, Trust Funds,
Rhodes Trust, 1947–1949: Applications for African Research Fellowships: G. M. Pitje,
Godfrey Pitje/Director SAIIR, 7 June 1949, Fort Hare, application for fellowship; WC,
uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 8 Aug. 1951, Wilberforce
Inst., Transvaal; ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 27 Oct. 1952, Jane Furze; ibid.,
Monica Wilson/‘To Whom it May Concern’ [for post as Senior Social Research Scholar
at Univ. of Natal], 28 July 1953, n.p.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/Godfrey Pitje, 3 June 1952, n.p.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
215
Figure 6.3. Godfrey Pitje in his later years as a lawyer.
there are problems there?’, persuaded him to join his Johannesburg law
firm instead.113
Through all this, Monica and Pitje continued to correspond. The last
substantial episode in their relationship concerned not Fort Hare but
113
University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIIR: Oral History Programme,
Transcripts, AD 1722/1, transcript 3: Interview by A. Manson with G. M. Pitje, Johannesburg, 28 Jan. 1982.
216
Inside African Anthropology
another bantustan institution. On 3 December 1977, Godfrey wrote to
Monica ‘in a state of confusion’, seeking advice. He had agreed to allow
his name to go forward as a nominee for chancellor of the University of
the North. He did not know whether he should allow the nomination to
proceed or what the job might entail: ‘Kindly give me your motherly as
well as professional advice . . . [t]here is nobody else I can turn to.’114
Monica wrote a long and thoughtful letter in reply. She said it was the
old question of how far to cooperate with a bad system, and when to
reject cooperation totally. Who, she asked, makes the decisions at Turfloop? ‘It’s no use your agreeing to stand if effective decisions are still
made in Pretoria, or if the younger generation has decided they cannot
use the university as at present organised.’ It was, she said, essentially a
political decision ‘as to how best to use position and influence in public
life, and I’m no politician! . . . I shall be remembering you and’ – ending
with an unusual, oblique and we can assume correspondingly heartfelt
religious reference – ‘asking for light for you’.115 Pitje replied saying
he was withdrawing his name. He had, he said, always held Monica’s
view that the younger generation should be listened to seriously, and,
in the only overt reference to his political activities in this correspondence, noted that this had been the essence of his relationship with Fort
Hare in the early 1950s, when he had been accused of fraternising with
students.116
There is a final letter in the file. Monica sent Pitje a copy of her recently
published For Men and Elders. ‘I shall start reading it tonight’, he said,
signing himself, ‘Your intellectual son, Godfrey’.117
These accounts make it clear that, through her professional life,
Monica was diligent in helping black students who faced many barriers if they wished to move beyond areas like the school teaching and
nursing regarded as appropriate for educated Africans. Examples can
be multiplied. A Fort Hare psychology student wrote to Monica of her
hope for a job in child guidance or similar, where she could use her
academic discipline. ‘I imagine that no such jobs are yet available to
Africans but I wanted to make sure.’ Monica wrote to Quinton Whyte,
assistant director of the Institute of Race Relations. Whyte suggested that
the student contact the National Council for Child Welfare, and Monica
114
115
116
117
WC, uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 3 Dec. 1977, Johannesburg.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/Godfrey Pitje, 13 Dec. 1977, Hogsback.
Ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 28 Dec. 1977, Johannesburg.
Ibid., Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 6 March 1978, Johannesburg. Monica sent Pitje
other material as well, such as her Religion and the Transformation of Society (WC, uncat.
corr., Godfrey Pitje, Godfrey Pitje/Monica Wilson, 2 Aug. 1974, Johannesburg). Near
the end of her life, Monica asked the British publisher of Freedom for My People to
send a copy to Pitje (WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica
Wilson/Rex Collings, 26 Feb. 1981, Hogsback).
‘Your Intellectual Son’
217
pursued the issue with this organisation.118 She wrote to Max Gluckman
at the RLI recommending the Southern Rhodesian Stanlake Samkange,
who was completing his first anthropology course at Fort Hare, for vacation work.119 She did her best to help Solomon Skosana, her student at
Fort Hare and later a researcher on the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey,
who was dismissed by the Department of Bantu Education on spurious
grounds. She made enquiries to confirm the facts and wrote to Skosana
that she was ‘most distressed’ to hear of his situation: the system, she
said, ‘is a terrible one’.120 She kept in touch with Curnick Ndamse, who
graduated in 1944 and later lectured in social anthropology and native
administration at Fort Hare. He remained in employment after the 1960
government takeover, but was sacked in 1965 for ‘insubordination’ and
‘reprehensible’ professional conduct, going on to an ambiguous career
in Transkei politics.121 Monica accepted Ndamse as a Ph.D. student in
anthropology at UCT but he did not respond to her attempts to help
and ‘produced nothing whatever’ before his untimely and some thought
suspicious death in 1974.122
Monica’s attempts to assist her black students to achieve the places
to which their talents and experience surely entitled them were often
frustrated by racism and discrimination. Given the politics of the time, it
is hard to know to what extent those whom she helped had the potential
to become significant figures, but the environment for black scholarship
had certainly deteriorated. It is difficult to imagine, say, a Z. K. Matthews
or an A. C. Jordan being able to achieve, in and after the late 1940s, what
had been possible in an earlier era.
Some of Monica’s Fort Hare students kept in touch with her for many
years. She was seen as sympathetic to their sensibility and aspirations.
118
119
120
121
122
University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, SAIRR Collection, Aa.3.1.14 (file
3), Head Office Corr.: General, 1945, Monica Wilson/Quinton Whyte, 18 June 1945,
Fort Hare; ibid., Quinton Whyte/Monica Wilson, 21 July 1945 [Johannesburg], ibid.,
Monica Wilson/Quinton Whyte, 21 July 1945, Fort Hare.
WC, uncat. corr., Tests, Miscellaneous, Monica Wilson/Max Gluckman, 28 Aug. 1946,
Alice. For more on Stanlake and the Samkange family, see Terence Ranger, Are We
Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe 1920–64 (Harare:
Baobab, 1995).
WC, uncat. corr., Solomon Skosana, Solomon Skosana/Monica Wilson, 7 Aug. 1962,
Middledrift; ibid., Monica Wilson/Solomon Skosana, 21 Aug. 1962, [Rondebosch,
Cape Town]; ibid., Kenneth Mali/Monica Wilson, 25 Sept. 1962, Fort Hare.
WC, J6.1, Papers concerning Academic Freedom Committee and Open Universities,
1956–1966, cutting from East London Daily Dispatch, 22 April 1965, ‘Senior Lecturer
at Fort Hare gets the sack’, and press statement by J. H. du Preez, Registrar, Fort Hare.
WC, uncat. corr., Colin Murray, Monica Wilson/Colin Murray, 1 June 1974,
Hogsback. See also ibid., J2, Social Anthropology Report: Students, Monica
Wilson/Registrar, UCT, 4 Oct. 1972, [Rondebosch, Cape Town]. Ndamse, for whom
Jack Simons externally examined, was also in touch through him with Monica (ibid.,
J13.1, [Curnick] Ndamse/Jack Simons, 22 Feb. 1961, Fort Hare). Thanks to Isaac
Ntabankulu for information about Ndamse.
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Inside African Anthropology
Francis Wilson remembers the Eluk students presenting Negro Caravan,
the landmark anthology of black American writing of its time, to his
mother when she was leaving Fort Hare, indicating some of the intellectual currents among the students and the ease with which they shared
these with Monica.123 Although Monica did not teach him, Joe Matthews
remembered her as ‘a Christian . . . very unusually close to the black
people in the area . . . She was really a true-blue liberal . . . believing that
people should be equal . . . and you might say she was . . . a type of English radical. You know, the English have produced a kind of radical who
was loyal to Church and Queen . . . but . . . radical in relation to racial
matters.’124
Teaching, Researching, Writing
Monica was at Fort Hare for only two and a half years, but, as Livingstone Mqotsi perceived, her approach to teaching and her ambitions for
the institution were different to those of Alexander Kerr. Some of her
teaching notes from 1945 survive. They give an academically rigorous
and socially involved introduction to the anthropological literature of
the day. Anthropology and sociology are ‘[o]ne and the same subject’
using the same methods, she wrote. It is ‘[o]nly by understanding society that we can control it’, arguing that the development of the social
sciences is the ‘basis of a more reasonable social order. Not to suggest
that knowledge will cure all our ills, but knowing what to do [is the] first
step’. Social anthropology has the ‘immediate practical value’ of promoting understanding between Europeans and Africans. Working before
subsequent advances in African history, the lack of written records in
African society meant to Monica that the comparative method typical
of social anthropology was ‘[c]omparable to study of English history in
[an] English University’, an interesting coda to her undergraduate study
of history at Cambridge, and a link to the subsequent Oxford History
and other attempts to marry history and anthropology.125 There would
be no special dispensations for African students, ‘no spoon feeding’,
and she expected to learn from as well as teach them. Her ambition
for the African Studies Department at Fort Hare was that it should
become ‘a centre for research. That is a centre where exact knowledge is
accumulated and digested’, a view at odds with Fort Hare policy at the
time.126
123
124
125
126
Interview with Francis Wilson, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7 March 2008; Sterling A.
Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, eds, Negro Caravan (New York: Dryden,
1941).
Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006.
See Chapter 9.
WC, J5, Monica Wilson Lecture Notes, notes from Fort Hare, 1945.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
219
Monica’s ambitions to make Fort Hare an important centre for African
studies were not realised. This is not surprising given the teaching rather
than research role the institution claimed; her intense workload, including
the self-imposed task of writing up the Nyakyusa material; the pressures
of raising her sons and caring for the young women of Eluk; and her brief
time at the college.
When Monica began at Fort Hare, she already had an excellent publication record, particularly the classic Reaction to Conquest127 and The
Analysis of Social Change, written with her husband. This appeared in
1945 when Monica was at Fort Hare but was substantially complete by
June 1943, when Godfrey, in Egypt, urged her to publish as soon as
their second child was born: ‘the book is yours now, to be delivered in
your own time’.128 Though it never had quite the impact that Godfrey
and Monica hoped for, it remains an early and important attempt by
anthropologists to grapple with change, using the concept of ‘enlargement of scale’. Written in the midst of professional disaster, unemployment, pregnancy, childbirth, parenthood and wartime service, with the
authors geographically separated for long periods, this taut and compact
book is a remarkable achievement.129
From Fort Hare, Monica announced that she was working on a twovolume book on Nyakyusa society for which the theoretical standpoint
was outlined in the Analysis of Social Change. The books would be supported by field documents, which would probably not be published but
deposited in the British Museum or elsewhere as ‘detailed evidence for
the more general account’. This idea evolved into a continuing project
not completed until her fourth Nyakusa monograph appeared in 1977.
While at Fort Hare, she published an article on ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’,
writing to Max Gluckman that when she had finished it she would move
on to family and public rituals.130 In reporting her areas of expertise to the
Royal Anthropological Institute, she noted that as well as teaching and
working on the Nyakyusa material, at Fort Hare she was ‘in close touch
with educated Africans from the Union, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and
other parts of Africa, as far north as Uganda’.131 ‘I find arguments in
127
128
129
130
131
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of
South Africa (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008 [1936], 4th edition).
WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 14 June 1943, UDF, MEF (Union Defence
Force, Middle East Forces) [Egypt].
Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change. For an appreciative
but critical contemporary review, see Audrey Richards, ‘Social Change in Central
Africa’, Spectator, 15 February 1946, 16.
WC, uncat. corr., Max Gluckman, Monica Wilson/Gluckman, 20 Oct. 1945, [Alice];
Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
79 (1949), 21–25.
Royal Anthropological Institute Archives, London, Census of British Anthropologists,
A71/399, Dr Monica Wilson, n.d. [but 1945/6]. For more on Fort Hare’s pan-African
220
Inside African Anthropology
class on such subjects as magic and science, or the social function of
lobola illuminating,’ she said.132 She also worked on her contribution to
the pivotal African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, and sent a draft to
the joint editor, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Attempting to maintain her professional credentials in an isolated corner of the Eastern Cape, she wrote
to Audrey Richards that she might not be up to date with current professional jargon. She was willing to adapt her chapter, but had received
little information from Radcliffe-Brown. ‘Have you any of the dope?’, she
asked.133
Monica was also involved in public affairs. In October 1946, she and
Z. K. Matthews gave evidence to the Native Laws Commission of
Enquiry, or Fagan Commission, in its sitting at King William’s Town.
She prepared thoroughly, scanning the most recent material on migrant
labour,134 and with Matthews submitted a cogent memorandum in
advance of the hearing. Matthews responded to questions of law on
Africans in urban areas. Citing her late husband’s work on Northern
Rhodesia, Monica wrote on migrant labour, focusing on its destructive
effects on family and social life.135 The two gave oral evidence together
in a lengthy interaction with the commissioners. Drawing on their Fort
Hare experience, they rejected the argument that higher education makes
Africans want to sit behind desks and order others to work. ‘No’, said
Matthews: ‘We . . . have been in close contact with the people who have
taken that training, and it is not correct to say that people who have
a degree have got that impression.’ They advocated private ownership
of land by Africans in rural areas, and improved marketing for African
produce.136
132
133
134
135
136
dimension to 1960, see Seán Morrow and Khayalethu Gxabalashe, ‘The Records of
the University of Fort Hare’, History in Africa, 27 (2000), 491–493.
WC, uncat. corr., Max Gluckman, document by Monica Wilson, Oct. 1945, Department of African Studies, Fort Hare, in Monica Wilson/Max Gluckman, 20 Oct. 1945,
[Alice]. This in response to copy Melville J. Herskovits/Max Gluckman, 29 June
1945, Evanston, forwarded with Max Gluckman/Monica Wilson, 6 Oct. 1945, Livingstone.
WC, B6.13, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown/Monica Wilson, 10 Aug. 1946, Dolgelly, and
Monica Wilson/A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, n.d., Alice, with which Monica Wilson sends
Radcliffe-Brown her chapter; WC, B.6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, n.d.
[1947?], Grahamstown; Monica Wilson, ‘Nyakyusa Kinship’ in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
and D. Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London: Oxford University
Press, 1950), 111–139.
WC, Additions, Information Files (partly cat.), Migrant Labour, Quinton White
(SAIRR)/Monica Wilson, 14 Aug. 1945, Johannesburg.
WC, Files on Various Subjects, L–N (partly cat.), Migrant Labour, Native Laws Commission of Enquiry: Questionnaire, [1946]; Native Laws Inquiry Commission, Statement by Prof. Z. K. Matthews and Dr M. Wilson, 17 Oct. 1946; Godfrey Wilson, An
Essay on the Economics of Detribalization.
University of Witwatersrand Historical Papers, Union of South Africa, Department of
Native Affairs, Native Laws Commission of Enquiry, Minutes of Evidence, Sitting of
24 Oct. 1946, King William’s Town, 1466, 1468, 1472.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
221
Monica and Fort Hare after Her Departure
Monica maintained links with Fort Hare when she left for Rhodes, from
where weekend trips to Hogsback were possible. From 1949 to 1957
the college was affiliated to Rhodes and Monica served on its council
for as long as she remained there.137 However, when Fort Hare was
incorporated by government into the ethnically based system designed
to produce graduates to administer the bantustans, and when friends and
ex-colleagues like Z. K. and Frieda Matthews felt obliged to resign or
were dismissed, her connection virtually ceased.
Monica wanted nothing to do with Fort Hare as an ethnic college.
She saw the tribal ideology on which these colleges were based as cynical and ‘mostly nonsense’.138 In 1980 she wrote to Frieda Matthews
from Hogsback that ‘I weep over Fort Hare . . . [t]here are a few good
members of staff – one or two live up here – but I think there are many
idle passengers, and the whole atmosphere is totally wrong. Money has
been poured in . . . as though buildings made a university’.139 The year
before her death, Monica read the inaugural address of Professor J. A.
Lamprecht, the new Fort Hare rector. She started to annotate it, noting
its many factual and interpretative errors, such as that Fort Hare had
been ‘managed and paid for by the Church of Scotland’, but stopped
after three pages. The detailed manner in which she tackled the document, and the abrupt cessation of her notes, imply passion followed by
sudden revulsion.140
Only when the Federal Theological Seminary, ‘Fedsem’, was launched
on the Fort Hare campus, separate from and often in conflict with the
university proper, did she become involved. She spoke at the opening
in 1966.141 She was a close friend of Fr Aelred Stubbs, of the Anglican
section of Fedsem,142 and was an associate of the seminary, acting as an
academic referee and commentator.143
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
WC, uncat. corr., Fort Hare Council, South African Native College, Minutes of Meeting of the Governing Council held in Stewart Hall, Fort Hare, on Friday 2 Nov.
1951; R. F. Currey, Rhodes University 1904–1970: A Chronicle (Grahamstown: Rhodes
University, 1970), 112, 137–138.
WC, Talks and Addresses (partly cat.), TS, notes for talk on ‘Bantustan?’, n.d. [but
filed with report of talk in Argus, 5 Nov. 1959].
WC, uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews, Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 4 June 1980,
Hogsback.
Ibid., Misc. Corr., Press Release, not to be released before 11.00, 25 April ’81 –
inaugural address of new Rector, Prof. J. A. Lamprecht, 25 April ’81, Fort Hare,
annotated in Monica Wilson’s handwriting.
WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 2 (partly cat.), outline of speech ‘The Implications of
the Gospel in South African Conditions’ for Seminary opening, 1966.
WC, uncat. corr., Aelred Stubbs, Stubbs/Monica Wilson, 24 May 1978, Maseru; Steve
Biko, I Write What I Like, ed. Fr. Aelred Stubbs, C.R. (Oxford: Heinemann Educational
Books, 1987 [1978], v.
WC, uncat. corr., Federal Theological Seminary, Arthur W. Stops/Monica Wilson,
3 Nov. 1973 and other documents in this file.
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Inside African Anthropology
Monica’s links with Fort Hare after 1960 were mainly with students
and staff from the past, above all with the Matthewses, who had also
known Pitje.144 Her relationship was such that even her most intense
and private grief could be touched upon in the context of the disaster
that had descended upon Z. K. and Frieda. In mid-1960, when the
Matthewses were running out of money and Frieda was reduced to giving
piano lessons and selling insurance, she wrote to Monica that ‘[w]hen I
think about your great sorrow years ago I tell myself I have nothing to
complain about!’145 Z. K. kept her in touch with the impact on himself
and his family of his departure from Fort Hare, and Monica got UCT
to offer him a temporary fellowship in social anthropology from January
1960.146
Monica’s last substantial work was Freedom for My People.147 This was
an edited version of the autobiographical material that Z. K. Matthews
left after his death in 1968, with additions by Monica where there were
gaps. His account, she notes, was ‘thinnest where his contribution was
perhaps greatest’, including his time as lecturer, professor and acting
principal at Fort Hare. Some of the most substantial material added
by Monica related to Matthews at Fort Hare, as student and teacher.
Of her four additional chapters, two mostly, and the conclusion partly,
were about his time there.148 In the search for material, she mobilised
numerous Fort Hare graduates and others, in South Africa and elsewhere, visiting Switzerland to investigate Matthews’s work for the World
Council of Churches, staying en route with Charles Njonjo, the Kenyan
attorney-general and a Fort Hare graduate of Monica’s time.149 Monica
herself appears fleetingly in the book, showing Tshekedi Khama, who
was planning a new school in Bechuanaland, around Eluk; attending
a dinner at the Matthewses’ home for visiting Shakespearean scholar
John Dover Wilson (who, she does not say, was her father-in-law); giving
144
145
146
147
148
149
Ibid., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Dr Tom Alty, 21 Jan. 1977,
Hogsback; Monica Wilson, ‘Preface’ in Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People,
viii.
WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Frieda Matthews/Monica
Wilson, 5 Aug. 1960, Alice. For the Matthewses’ financial position see ibid., Frieda
Matthews/Monica Wilson, 19 June 1960, Alice.
Ibid., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Z. K. Matthews/Monica Wilson, 21 Oct.
1959, Fort Hare; ibid., draft letter UCT Registrar/Z. K. Matthews, n.d. [but late
1959, Rondebosch, Cape Town], with note to Monica Wilson asking for advice and
requesting her to tell Matthews about the letter. Matthews did not take up the UCT
offer.
Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People is discussed from the perspective of Monica’s
historical writing in Chapter 9 in this volume.
Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, vii. Chapters 6 and 7 in this volume describe
Matthews’s career at Fort Hare. Chapter 12 stresses his connection with the college.
WC, uncat. corr., Corr. re Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/Charles Njonjo,
15 Feb. 1978, Hogsback.
‘Your Intellectual Son’
223
evidence with Matthews on behalf of the Fort Hare senate to the Fagan
Commission in 1946; noting the distress of her Eluk students, reflected in
their prayers and hymns, after the shooting dead of nine striking African
mine workers on the Rand in November 1946.150 ‘The expectation of
achievement, through education, of equal political rights for black and
white’, she wrote, ‘was nourished at Fort Hare.’151 For many pages she
lists graduates, men and women, who went on to prominence, many of
them South Africans whose careers were disrupted by white supremacist
politics.152 The book is an elegy for the Fort Hare she had known and
for the national leadership manqué, African and Christian, symbolised by
Matthews, that it had produced.
150
151
152
Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People, 120, 123, 124–125.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 127–36.
7
Witchcraft and the Academy: Livingstone
Mqotsi, Monica Wilson and the Middledrift
Healers, 1945–1957
Leslie J. Bank
During the apartheid years, black academic advancement was actively
discouraged and progress beyond a basic Bachelor’s degree was seen
as socially and politically threatening by the white state and its tertiary
educational authorities.1 If Africans showed exceptional academic ability, they were generally steered towards teaching in secondary schools or
training colleges in their own communities. The aim was to keep African
intellectual talent out of the white academy. It is not surprising then that
many potential African academics ended up as teachers in high schools
rather than as lecturers at universities, and that the various African teachers’ associations were among the most vibrant intellectual and political
spaces in South Africa in the 1950s. The glass ceiling of academic opportunity under apartheid was very difficult to break through, and it was only
a handful of Africans with committed and influential white patrons, like
Archie Mafeje or Bernard Magubane,2 who made it to good universities
in Britain or America and so opened up opportunities for international
academic careers. The passing of the Bantu Education Act of 1953 was
a watershed moment. It drove many budding South African intellectuals in schools into underground politics or into exile. Many ended up
as frustrated academics in black high schools or political activists in the
liberation movements.3
One promising young African scholar caught in this predicament
was Livingstone Mqotsi. He was Monica Wilson’s most talented social
anthropology student at Fort Hare in the 1940s. Mqotsi made a name
for himself there in 1946 when, as a second-year student, he authored
1
2
3
I would like to thank Iris Mqotsi for her comments on this chapter, as well as Andrew
Bank for his critical comments and suggestions on a previous draft.
On Mafeje see Chapter 8, this volume; on Magubane see his autobiography Bernard
Magubane: My Life and Times (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010),
169–174.
Z. K. Matthews was one of the few local exceptions who began his career as a school
teacher after training at the University of Fort Hare. He later returned to that university
as an academic, after serving as principal at Adams College in Natal. See Monica Wilson,
ed., Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to
1968 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1981), 83–92.
224
Witchcraft and the Academy
225
and published a seminal essay on an African separatist Church in Port
Elizabeth in the prestigious academic journal African Studies.4 It was
unusual enough for an African to do so, but exceptional for one who had
not yet completed his undergraduate degree. It was Monica Wilson, his
teacher and mentor, who inspired him to pursue his research interests
independently and submit his undergraduate essay for publication.
Monica nurtured Mqotsi but, before he could mature fully as a student of anthropology at the graduate level, she left Fort Hare to become
the first female professor at Rhodes University. Without adequate supervision, Mqotsi’s academic career drifted off course in the 1950s before
he submitted a thesis on healing and witchcraft among the Xhosa of
the Middledrift district in the Ciskei to the University of the Witwatersrand in 1957. In this chapter I focus on Mqotsi’s academic development
and frustrations as an anthropologist and explore his close intellectual
relationship with Monica over the period between 1946 and 1957.
On the evening of 24 June 2008 Livingstone Mqotsi, now in his late
eighties, paid tribute to Monica at the conference commemorating the
centenary of her birth at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. He delivered
a moving address in which he spoke of her seminal influence on his
intellectual development as a young man and of her humanity, integrity, professional commitment and engaging intellect. I was surprised to
hear Mqotsi speak with such academic passion for anthropology and the
sociocultural study of African societies because I knew him only as a liberation movement leader, a schoolteacher and a political journalist from
the Eastern Cape. Later I learnt that he was also one of the most talented
young African anthropologists of the apartheid era in South Africa and
that his work had begun under Monica’s wing.
In the months after the Monica Wilson Centenary Conference, Mqotsi
and I became firm friends. We met frequently to discuss his life and work.
I would arrive at his house in Baysville in East London in the mornings. We would sit and talk in the conservatory or the lounge about his
childhood in Keiskammahoek, his days as a teenager in Port Elizabeth,
his political involvement with the Non-European Unity Movement and
the African Teachers’ Association, the enormous frustrations and disappointments that came with being a black intellectual in early apartheid
South Africa, his time in exile and of course his anthropological fieldwork in New Brighton and Middledrift. Our discussions ran deep. They
usually started and ended with Fort Hare, with its intellectual promise and broken dreams, our common connection to the institution, and
its politics and history. But our discussions drifted in all sorts of other
4
See Livingstone Mqotsi and Nimrod Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church: Ibandla lika-Krestu’,
African Studies, 5, 2 (1946), 106–142.
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Inside African Anthropology
directions as well. I seldom arrived at his house with a clear list of questions. I had issues to discuss, and we had open-ended conversations rather
than tightly structured interviews. He was quick to take on the mantle of
teacher with me as student.
In September 2009, while I was on sabbatical in the United States,
he died at his home in East London at the age of 87. Tributes were
carried in all the major national newspapers.5 He was celebrated as a
political figure, a leader in the Non-European Unity Movement, a former
secretary-general of the All African Convention and an extraordinary
teacher who mentored Chris Hani. None of the obituaries mentioned his
academic achievements and his fascinating anthropological work. This
chapter seeks to help remedy that imbalance.
A full biography of Mqotsi will no doubt appear in time as his story
is well worth telling. Here I focus on just one aspect: his life and work
as an anthropologist and one of Monica’s protégés. Clearly, after a very
promising start at Fort Hare in the mid-1940s, Mqotsi failed to break
through into the South African academy in the 1950s. What kind of
anthropology did Mqotsi write as a student of the discipline? How were
his interests shaped by his training under Monica? What stalled and
frustrated his progress? How did his work develop intellectually, and
what role did his early mentor play in his scholarship? Why did he never
get an academic job in South Africa? And how does his story differ from
that of the more famous Archie Mafeje, Monica’s celebrated student at
the University of Cape Town and co-author with her of the Langa study
that will be discussed in the next chapter?
My account is based on a close reading of correspondence between
Mqotsi and Monica between 1945 and 1955, more than thirty hours
of interviews with Mqotsi at his East London home between July and
December 2008, and a close analysis of his academic and political writings. Mqotsi’s story is fascinating for many reasons, not least because it
reveals intriguing aspects of a hidden history in South Africa anthropology. It documents the early involvement and interest of African scholars in the subject and in the production of insider ethnographies. I see
Mqotsi as one of a cast of characters from the early apartheid years,
which included Godfrey Pitje, Absolom Vilakazi, Bernard Mugubane and
Archie Mafeje, who were attracted to the discipline because it promised,
on the one hand, to lay a foundation for a genuine sociology of African
societies that embraced indigenous concepts and categories (an ‘insider
perspective’), while enforcing scientific rigour through generalisation and
comparison. In a society where African social and cultural life was often
5
Sunday Times, 4 October 2009; Daily Dispatch, 30 September 2009; Eastern Cape Herald,
30 September 2009.
Witchcraft and the Academy
227
derided in public and demeaned in academic discourse, anthropology
seemed to be a progressive intellectual space that promoted cultural
relativism and tolerance while offering Africans a means of documenting
their own lives and histories in a form that was credible and scientific.
In her work on Pondoland, East London and Tanzania, Monica relied
on Africans, as we have seen, as field assistants, translators and the interpreters of local social and cultural practice. They were fellow travellers on
field trips and offered insights and perspectives on everyday life that made
their way into her finished ethnographies. However, in the mid-1940s
when Monica came to Fort Hare as a teacher rather than a researcher,
she went out of her way to persuade and train her African students
to become anthropologists in their own right as researchers who were
familiar with the language, concepts and methods of anthropology. She
wanted them to know how to apply what they had learnt in class in their
own communities. To develop her students in this direction, she required
that all those majoring in social anthropology should design, implement
and complete a mini field-research project and write up an ethnographic
report. It was this commitment to making students do their own research,
an activity virtually unheard of in undergraduate courses at Fort Hare
at the time, that ignited a flame in the mind of Livingstone Mqotsi (and
others) and started him on a journey of anthropological enquiry.
This chapter is devoted primarily to the story of Livingstone Mqotsi
and his intellectual endeavour, ingenuity and determination in the face
of a system that simply would not accept him, and ultimately forced exile
and academic exclusion on him. But the chapter is also about Monica and
her relationship with this emerging African anthropologist and political
activist. It reveals how she shaped his intellectual focus and inculcated
an appreciation for the value of fieldwork and ethnography as a basis
for knowledge production in Africa. The chapter also reveals some of
the tensions and stresses in Monica’s own academic career as she moved
from Fort Hare to Rhodes in the late 1940s and then to the University of
Cape Town. In the process a certain distance developed between her and
Mqotsi, who became immersed in liberation politics in the 1950s and
was now struggling to complete his study of witchcraft and healing in the
Middledrift district of the Eastern Cape. The story I present is a South
African tragedy, where witchcraft and sorcery feature not only as topics
of Mqotsi’s anthropological research but also as features of his experience
within the academy. His life serves both as a reminder of the intellectual
deprivations of apartheid and of the position of anthropology as a site
of intellectual curiosity and endeavour amongst the postwar universitytrained African elite of the 1950s. This chapter and the one that follows it
also focus attention, more generally, on the role of hidden ethnographies
and ethnographers in the making of southern African anthropology.
228
Inside African Anthropology
Living in a Sister’s House, 1930–1945
Livingstone Mqotsi was born in 1921, the last child of a large peasant
family in Keiskammahoek. His father had been Christianised, attended church and had some exposure to Western-style schooling, but was
neither a timid nor an apologetic man. Mqotsi remembered him as a
fiercely independent farmer who regularly clashed with the native commissioner over land allocations, grazing rights and forestry policies on
the outskirts of Keiskammahoek town. He was poor and owned a small
herd of cattle and farmed some maize, struggling to feed his growing
family.6 Mqotsi recalled his father’s tense relations with the authorities,
but also that he worked closely with some of the German settler farmers
in town who were supportive. They lent his father ploughs and tools. As
a child Livingstone played with ‘some of these German kids, who were
neighbours’.7 He could speak some words of German before he was
five.
Unlike his siblings, who did not make much progress at school, Mqotsi
was a talented scholar. He went to Grandville Junior Primary and then
to St Barnabas Higher Primary in Rabula village in Keiskammaheok.
His father was keen for him to progress to St Matthews or one of the
other prestigious mission high schools in the area, but given their financial
position the only hope was for him to win a local scholarship administered
through the colonial government. These awards tended to go to the
children of senior clerks or interpreters in the colonial service rather
than to children of troublesome peasant farmers. He remembers his
father’s disappointment when the native commissioner announced that
the scholarship had been awarded to the son of Mr Pateni, a senior clerk
in the commissioner’s office.8
With no scholarship or funds to study further, he left home to join his
sister in Port Elizabeth in 1935. Two of his siblings had already moved to
the city to find work. His eldest sister Esther worked in a factory and was
prepared to support him with clothes and school fees, but she did not
want him to stay with her. He moved in with Miriam, a sister who was
married to a certain Guston Majombozi, leader of the Limba Separatist
Church in New Brighton. The Limba Church was one of the largest
in Port Elizabeth with a congregation of over 1,500 in the mid-1930s.
Mqotsi recalled:
6
7
8
For an account of Keiskammahoek in the 1930s, see Monica Wilson, Selma Kaplan,
Theresa Maki and Edith M. Walton, Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, vol. 3: Social Structure
(Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952) and Chris de Wet, Moving Together, Drifting
Apart: Betterment Planning and Villagisation in a South African Homeland (Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press, 1995).
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 15 September 2008. All interviews
cited in this chapter are by the author.
Ibid., 28 September 2008.
Witchcraft and the Academy
229
It was very busy in the house and it was difficult for me to concentrate
on my school work. There were so many congregants, services and prayer
meetings . . . Living in this house was, I suppose, my first real anthropological experience. It was so different. This was not my home culture. It was
something different, quite foreign to me really, I was not a Limba Church
member and never wanted to be one. This irritated Guston, who wanted
me to be one of his disciples, even his successor. I became immersed in it
anyway. I always wondered how my sister coped, but she was so devoted
to Guston and his mission.9
Since there was no high school nearby, he was sent to Paterson High
School in the ‘coloured area’ in Port Elizabeth. This was the best school
for black children in the city.10 Here he rubbed shoulders with outstanding students including Dennis Brutus, and was profoundly influenced by
two teachers from the Cape Teachers’ League and the Non-European
Unity Movement, Mr Arendse and Mr Jafta. His political consciousness
was formed and fixed at Paterson as a loyal Unity Movement activist.
Mqotsi found school very stimulating and would stay until late in the
afternoon participating in cultural activities and debating current political
issues with his teachers. As the years passed, he found the gap between
his own social and political consciousness and his Limba Church home
life increasingly uncomfortable. The authoritarian and orthodox rules of
his uncle felt more and more restrictive. In the Limba version of Christianity, the male head priest, known as Tata, was all-powerful. He got
his directive from God and had to be obeyed;11 there was no scope for
debate or discussion. Mqotsi recalled that Guston did not approve of the
way he wanted to dress and wear his hair. So he eventually decided to
leave Miriam’s house and went to stay with his brother, who was now also
in Port Elizabeth. His sister Esther continued to support him financially.
The social and political scene in New Brighton location was vibrant.12
Mqotsi was enthralled by the optimism and openness of urban life.
Increasingly, he sought to widen his social circle and, together with
George Pemba, the South African artist and former Paterson High School
student, he started the Bantu Social and Cultural Club of New Brighton
in 1940. Pemba was ten years older than Mqotsi and had already trained
as a teacher at Lovedale. He had also received numerous awards and
scholarships to work with artists at Rhodes University and in Cape Town
(where in 1941 he spent some time at Maurice van Essche’s studio).
9
10
11
12
Ibid, 28 September 2008.
Paterson High School was predominantly for the so-called ‘coloured community’ but
did also serve the location of New Brighton. The school produced many coloured
political leaders, intellectuals and activists, including Dennis Brutus, Jakes Gerwel and
Allan Hendrickse.
See Mqotsi and Mkele, ‘Separatist Church’.
See Gary Baines, A History of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 1903–1953
(New York: Edwin Mellen, 2002).
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Inside African Anthropology
Mqotsi was inspired by Pemba’s creativity and used his own organising
skills to host a series of cultural events, everything from exhibitions to
poetry readings and political debates. He remembers how artists like
Gerald Sekoto, who had a similar style to Pemba’s, came to work in New
Brighton in the early 1940s.13
In 1942 Mqotsi finished school at Paterson with excellent marks. His
father urged him to get a bursary and go to Fort Hare Native College,
but he was not yet ready to leave New Brighton. He remembers being
singularly unimpressed with the Fort Hare students he had met with in
Port Elizabeth. He found their political arguments unsophisticated and
was more taken with his new Non-European Unity Movement colleagues
and their political and intellectual tradition. In any event, Pemba had
become something of a role model for Mqotsi, who at this stage felt he
wanted to pursue a career as a classical musician. He had learnt the violin
and in 1944 trained with the Port Elizabeth Symphony Orchestra under
the baton of Robert Sally. Sally’s assistant was prepared to work with
him, helping him master the violin, while he took a part-time job as an
assistant with a firm of lawyers. As the year drew to an end, the pressure
from his father to go to Fort Hare became overwhelming. At the end of
1944, Mqotsi was literally instructed to report for studies at Fort Hare.
He won a Cape scholarship of £20 a year. His father was willing to meet
the rest of the bill.
Monica and the Limba Church Study, 1945–1946
When he started at the University of Fort Hare as a freshman in 1945,
Mqotsi was a suave city-slicker with political experience and a sense of
cultural sophistication. He registered for history, English, anthropology
and psychology in his first year. He had always had a natural flair for
languages and writing. He was often asked to take the minutes at meetings
or do translations from Xhosa to English, was widely read and had been
an acknowledged Shakespeare enthusiast and poet at his school. He
had helped inculcate an appreciation for English literature in the New
Brighton Bantu Social and Cultural Club, too. English was always going
to be one of his majors, but he did not really know what to expect of
social anthropology. As we have seen in Chapter 6, Mqotsi was deeply
influenced by his new lecturer in the subject. He told me that he was
immediately impressed by the academic style and acumen of Dr Monica
Wilson. He felt that she was serious about her subject and presented
fascinating cross-cultural material in lectures. He found it easy to relate to
her anthropological perspective, given his own encounters across cultures
from his early years with the sons of German settlers in Keiskammahoek,
13
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 15 September 2008.
Witchcraft and the Academy
231
his early teens in the company of Limba Church members and converts
in New Brighton, and high school days with coloured kids at Paterson
to his post-school years with cultural icons in the location and white
musicians in the Port Elizabeth Symphony Orchestra. He found Monica
approachable and would often go up at the end of a class to ask a question
or discuss things.
Building on his New Brighton experience, Mqotsi started a cultural
club at Fort Hare in his first year. He asked Monica to be a guest speaker
on the topic of ‘dinner etiquette’. She accepted the invitation and this
cemented their connection. He recalled how marvellously she presented
the lecture with a practical demonstration of English upper-class table
manners. No doubt she drew partly on her time at Cambridge. She then
compared this with African cultural practices, which had students talking
about her lecture for weeks afterwards. Mqotsi was also impressed by how
fully she immersed herself in the life of the university. She was willing
to engage with students outside the classroom, unlike some other white
lecturers. He also quickly realised that she was a significant intellectual,
the most serious one he would encounter at Fort Hare. He wanted to
work more closely with her. He recalled liking her lectures because she
so often illustrated points with vivid examples from her own fieldwork
among the Pondo and Nyakyusa. Her experience in the field and passion
for research came through clearly in the classroom, all of which made
her teaching very different from that of others at Fort Hare whose focus
seemed to be on training students to do nothing better than cope in a
small set of jobs (as clerks, teachers, priests or social workers) rather than
developing them for the academic world as critical thinkers.14
In her introductory lecture to Social Anthropology I students, Monica
explained that her ambition was for ‘the African Studies Department at
Fort Hare’ to become a ‘centre for research . . . where exact knowledge
is accumulated and digested’.15 Her lecture notes express the spirit of
critical enquiry that she sought to impart.
Lectures to give you a general idea of a subject. I hope to interest you.
Guidance for reading. But you cannot expect to get along simply by coming
to lectures. No spoon feeding. Must also read for yourself. In the natural
sciences, they do practicals. In sociology, we expect you to read and write
essays.16
She expected her students to hand in essays each Wednesday and she
would not accept late work. In her lectures she explained that she saw
no clear distinction between social anthropology and sociology. They
14
15
16
Ibid., 4 November 2008.
WC, J5, Monica Wilson Lecture Notes, Monica Wilson, 1945, Fort Hare Lecture
Notes, under a section entitled ‘Warnings’.
Ibid., ‘Lectures’.
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are ‘one and the same subject,’ she wrote in her notes, with ‘the same
methods’.17 She emphasised that only by ‘understanding society [scientifically] can we hope to control it’ and felt that, while the natural sciences
had forged ahead, the ‘social sciences were lagging behind’.18 To develop
anthropology, she repeatedly stated, it was essential that exact and reliable
knowledge be collected in the field, most of all for social anthropology.
Clearly, what Monica offered her students and expected of them in return
was considerably more challenging and demanding than in most other
courses they attended.19
By the end of his first year Mqotsi was well acquainted with Monica.
His outstanding ability as a student had captured her attention, as had
his skills as a writer. For him, Monica emerged both as an intellectual
and a multi-dimensional person.
She was a many-sided sort of person, mother, teacher, social worker. And
she never instructed people, you know, do this or do that. She would lay
the matter of the discussion on the table and then would ask what you think
before putting her own important view across. She always suggested things.
You always felt good, like you are invited to come in and consider this
proposition. But she was also quite focused, she knew what she wanted.20
Mqotsi had no doubt that he wanted to major in social anthropology. He
remembers arguing with Monica about religion and using examples from
his own experience with the Limba Church to support his views.21 As he
thought more deeply on the topic, he believed he could produce a historical and ethnographic account of the Limba Church for his second-year
research project (see Chapter 6). He was excited at the prospect and did
not want to tell Monica too much about what he was planning to do.
He discussed the matter with his Fort Hare roommate Nimrod Mkele,
who was not registered for anthropology but was a close friend from New
Brighton. In 1946 they made several trips to Port Elizabeth and conducted lengthy interviews with congregants and leaders in the Church to
gather or verify information. Mqotsi spent the entire June vacation doing
17
18
19
20
21
Ibid., ‘Aims and Methods of Anthropology’.
Ibid.
Mqotsi often said that the rest of the arts faculty at Fort Hare seemed to want to train
Africans to be civil servants or teachers in their own communities, not independent
researchers and intellectuals. He felt Monica was different. She genuinely wanted her
students to become researchers in their own right. One criticism he levelled at Z. K.
Matthews was that he did not challenge his students enough intellectually, while Monica
was always pushing boundaries.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 14 October 2008.
After completing Reaction to Conquest, Monica had planned to undertake a major study
on African independent Churches in South Africa, but then chose to work in Tanzania
with Godfrey. African Christianity interested her enormously and she would have been
fascinated by Mqotsi’s work on the Limba Church.
Witchcraft and the Academy
233
Figure 7.1. African Studies Department faculty and senior students, Fort Hare,
1946. Mqotsi is seated at the end of the middle row, far left in the picture. Monica
is in the centre of the middle row, with Z. K. Matthews on her left.22
fieldwork in New Brighton, staying with his sister Miriam and Guston.23
Working with Mkele seemed to make the project easier, although Mqotsi
led the research and wrote up the entire study himself. On returning to
Fort Hare, he presented their findings to Monica as an undergraduate
research essay. She was greatly impressed by the quality of the research,
which he had done without even informing her or asking her advice.
He had wanted to prove that he was an independent thinker who could
take initiatives and do fieldwork on his own. Monica immediately sent
the research paper to the premier anthropology journal in South Africa,
African Studies, with a letter to the editors encouraging them to publish it
as an article. It appeared under both Mqotsi and Mkele’s names in a 1946
issue and received considerable praise as a pioneering study of an Eastern Cape African independent Church. Publication confirmed Mqotsi’s
status as an up-and-coming researcher and intellectual in African
studies.
In Figure 7.1, a photograph taken in 1945, we see Mqotsi (middle row,
far left) sitting alongside senior faculty who were many years his senior.
He was only 25 years old at the time. He is also dressed in a manner
22
23
WC, N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups.
Mqotsi said Mkele had secured a Cape Education Department scholarship to study
science at Fort Hare but failed to complete his degree and ended up at the University
of Natal, where he graduated in social anthropology under Eileen Krige (Interview with
Livingstone Mqotsi, 28 September 2008).
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Inside African Anthropology
befitting a seasoned professional, while some of the other senior students
look more casual on the floor in the front row. Monica stands out not
only as the only white figure in the photograph, but as a formal presence
in her hat and with her erect posture.
Preparing for Fieldwork in Middledrift
After completing his Honours year Mqotsi started to communicate with
Monica, by then Professor of Social Anthropology at Rhodes University.
He was keen to start a research project on African healers. She suggested
that he combine his interests in psychology and anthropology by embarking on a study of Xhosa practitioners. She emphasised that this would
require in-depth and careful fieldwork but felt it could make an important contribution. On 17 March 1947 he wrote to her for advice in setting
out a work plan on the subject for his Masters thesis.
As you advised me to take a senior degree in Psychology, I have since
interviewed Dr Jansen [psychology lecturer at Fort Hare] on the subject
and intimated to him what I am particularly interested in investigating,
namely the problems involved in those people who thwasa [heal] and pass
as diviners. He is quite appreciative of the undertaking, but would like
me to submit a plan of work in which a definite set of questions will be
formulated.24
She wrote back a week later with several suggestions. She said that he
should begin with at least twelve detailed case histories of individuals who
had been through initiation as healers, focusing on their life experiences
and medical histories, close interpersonal relationships and standing in
the community at large, as well as their perceptions, experiences and
practices as traditional doctors. She also wanted him to include their
actual dreams and their ideas about the ancestors. Then, she felt, he
should collect the views of neighbours and relatives on what they thought
of these healers, and what sense they had of their power and success. She
advised him to participate in healing sessions and séances. On the basis
of this work, she expected he could start analysing the social functions of
doctors (abathwasayo), as well as the psychological causes and effects of
ukuthwasa.25 Mqotsi wrote back a mere four days later, thanking Monica
24
25
WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Livingstone Mqotsi/Monica Wilson, 17 March
1947, Fort Hare. In the letter Monica encourages him to visit her at 7 Constitution
Street in Grahamstown. In his reply, he indicated that he would be in Grahamstown
on 3 May and would drop in then. I assume the visit did take place and that they were
able to discuss his project and his upcoming fieldwork in Middledrift in more detail.
Unfortunately I only consulted this correspondence after Mqotsi’s death and so could
not check such details with him.
WC, uncat corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 26 March
1947.
Witchcraft and the Academy
235
for her input and suggesting it would be better for him to pursue the
project in a rural setting rather than in New Brighton, where his previous
field experience now persuaded him that healers in a rural area ‘would
be less suspicious of outsiders and community responses would be easier
to map than in the city’.26 He said he had heard of a famous family of
healers in Middledrift, the Njajula family, and he wanted to include them
in his study. My reading of the correspondence is that this project was as
much Monica’s idea as it was Mqotsi’s. In fact, in this letter of 30 March
1947 he goes as far as to call the proposal ‘our project’ (my emphasis).27
In February 1948 he wrote to Monica from New Brighton, where he
had a teaching job, to say that he had won a scholarship for his Masters
and was looking forward to getting back to the university. A month later
he arrived to enrol for a Masters in psychology at Fort Hare, only to discover that Professor Jansen (his shadow adviser) had taken a job at Natal
University and would be leaving in June. With no formal supervisor to
guide his work, he became increasingly drawn into student politics in
1948. Throughout his time at Fort Hare, Mqotsi had championed NonEuropean Unity Movement politics on campus and helped establish a
cadre of supporters. They argued on political issues with students from
the African National Congress (ANC), the dominant political presence
on campus. Mqotsi remembered the intensity of these political debates
at the very time when the Afrikaner Nationalist government came to
power. He was also attracted by the possibility of participating in the
National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), ‘belonging to an
organisation which had international standing and aimed to unite students across racial boundaries and borders’.28 He was appointed onto
the national executive of NUSAS in 1948, along with Philip Tobias and
Sydney Brenner (a Nobel laureate in 2002), and was given the ‘general
culture portfolio’. In that year he attended numerous political meetings
and congresses, delivered speeches and initiated a cultural survey of the
Transkei, which he compiled into a report and had published.29
After the NUSAS congress in the latter half of 1948, Mqotsi returned
to his research and started to prepare for his first field visits. Monica
had encouraged him to present himself to the healers as an urbanite,
an outsider who had lost contact with his own cultural roots but had a
deep abiding interest in understanding and reconnecting with his own
cultural background. He liked this approach, but first he needed to get
an introduction to people in the village of Debe Nek. This is where
26
27
28
29
Ibid., Livingstone Mqotsi/Monica Wilson., 30 March 1947.
Ibid.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 October 2008.
Mqotsi presented the results of the survey to the annual NUSAS congress in July 1948
in a paper that was published in the NUSAS Research Journal in 1951.
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Inside African Anthropology
Z. K. Matthews played a key role. Z. K. had made contact with chiefs in
the area in the course of his work on the Native Representative Council, a
separate government administrative body on which Africans could serve.
(Mqotsi recalled that people knew Z. K. as ‘u-Matthus’.) ‘This is what
I mean when I say that Z. K. was a decent man’, he said, ‘this kind of
generosity was not necessary, but it was the sort of thing he would do.
Z. K. immediately put the community leadership at ease and gave me
legitimacy by getting the headman to give me permission to enter the
area’.
In the interview, Mqotsi remembers that the village was split down the
middle between a Christianised section (amagqoboka) and a traditionalist,
Red (amaqaba) section.
I moved straight in with the Christians that day, setting myself up in a
household. This would be my base for the next nine months while conducting my fieldwork . . . I would make contact with people who believed
in the powers of special people, and would then go to sessions and séances
where they would heal people . . . And I, of course, had a special sort of
training there because I had to understand what the process was, but I
never had a calling to become a healer myself, nor did I undergo training
to be a healer.
He explained there was no problem with acceptance in the community.
The strange irony in this divided community, he suggested, was that the
Christianised families who went to church often seemed to be ‘more
passionate about witchcraft than their pagan neighbours’. Conversely,
he was puzzled by the enthusiasm of non-Christians, who were usually
alleged to have no interest in Britain and the West, to ‘perform their
culture for the Queen’.
I explained that I was an urban person who wanted to understand and
document my culture better . . . I was accepted completely and they [the
amaqaba people] would ask me why I was not taking notes or writing down
what they were saying. They thought that the research was going to be
presented to the Queen of England. So I wrote, and because this was going
to be recorded for ‘the queen’ (of England) . . . they gave their best. They
performed their culture and put it down as best they possibly could and
insisted that I record it. So they gave their best for the Queen!30
Mqotsi was intrigued by the paranormal and the extrasensory capacity of healers. He said that people came from far and wide to consult
them. The healers would organise a session for divination and get their
apprentices to work on their patients first before intervening themselves
if the cases were complex. Mqotsi attended many of these consultations.
He explained that he was actually far less interested in the recipes they
30
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 28 September 2008.
Witchcraft and the Academy
237
dished up, telling patients to perform this or that ritual for the ancestors,
than in the insights they generated into people’s lives. He said he was
endlessly amazed at their sixth sense, their ability to quote the names
of their clients’ children without knowing them at all, of being able to
locate the position of scars on the body, to list family disasters and the
timing of deaths, and so on. It was like magic to him. He was also
intrigued that white farmers in Middledrift came to see them and have
their fortunes told or misfortunes explained. Some of the white farmers
were asked to perform Xhosa rituals to address their spiritual and social
insecurities.
He likened the healers’ sessions to séances in Europe and was forever
thinking about cross-cultural references for local practices. He recalled
one incident in a church.
I remember very vividly. I used to attend church services and there is this
particular Sunday. There was this young fellow who came from a nonChristian background and became converted. He could hardly read or
write, but suddenly started to preach. Somehow he seemed to be able to
read the Bible even though he was illiterate. He read this passage: ‘you
Galatians, who has bewitched you?’ Now ‘bewitched’, that’s umthakathi in
Xhosa. He interpreted this literally and had the congregation spellbound,
saying that it happens today. For example, when men and women leave the
village and forget about their relatives this is because they are bewitched.
Mqotsi went on to comment:
Witchcraft is not actually practised, it is a metaphor. The whole idea of
people carrying strange things in their bodies, it’s so weird, it doesn’t
happen. It is just in the mind but sorcery is practised. For example, a
young man who is head-over-heels in love with a girl but the girl doesn’t
respond appropriately, he goes and mixes a love potion made from herbs
and other things and feeds it to her – that is the sorcery and that is actually
practised.31
After completing his fieldwork, Mqotsi returned to Alice to start writing up his thesis when the university opened in 1949. But there were
distractions on the political front. The ANC had called a watershed conference in Port Elizabeth to discuss a ‘Programme of Action’ for the
Defiance Campaign. Mqotsi had been asked to participate by the ANC
leadership, despite not being a party member. He was close to many
youth leaders in the movement and his views were respected, hence the
privilege of the invitation. It gave him an opportunity to engage directly
with leaders like Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela.
There were other changes in his life at this time. In 1949 he proposed
to a young woman from Nqamakwe in the former Transkei and was
31
Ibid.
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Inside African Anthropology
Figure 7.2. A gathering of Eastern Cape healers, East London, 1940.32
involved in bridewealth negotiations. This put him under financial and
personal pressure. To address these challenges, he applied for a post in the
F. S. Malan Museum at Fort Hare. He was keen to get the position but
was declined in favour of Godfrey Pitje (whose life and work have been
discussed in Chapter 6). Mqotsi felt that his old friend Z. K. Matthews
had favoured Pitje as a leading light in the ANC Youth League rather
than because of superior qualifications for the job. He recalled having
felt embarrassed by his failure, which undermined his confidence and
sense of well-being. Monica was, unfortunately, overseas in 1949 and
not available to answer letters, offer informal advice and comment on his
thesis work as she had done before.
With no supervision, he submitted a hurriedly completed Masters
thesis to the Department of Psychology at the University of South Africa
(where he finally ended up registering) at the end of 1949. The writingup process was rushed and he was very unsure about the quality of the
work he submitted. But he also had little choice. His research bursary
had run out and he urgently needed a paying job to support himself and
his new wife. He was under enormous pressure to get the thesis out of
the way. He was aware there had been too many political and personal
distractions in his life in 1949 to produce his best work, but still felt he
had done enough to pass the degree and move on to his Ph.D. He was
32
East London, Fort Hare Institute for Social and Economic Research, Moyikwa Collection, No. 241.
Witchcraft and the Academy
239
surprised when the examiners ruled that the thesis should be resubmitted
with major revisions because it did not seem to be based on adequate
original scientific research. The examiners expected a larger sample of
healers as well as the use of a formal questionnaire to gauge local perceptions in relation to traditional healing and witchcraft. This was not
the approach that Monica had advised. She had placed the emphasis on
in-depth interviews, participation and analysis of the lives, activities and
social networks of a small group of healers. But even Monica, who later
read the referred thesis, said she was disappointed in the quality of the
ethnography he had presented.33 Mqotsi was unsure how to proceed but
knew that he had wasted an opportunity and now had no choice but to
leave the university and find a job.
Healdtown and Bantu Education, 1950–1954
Mqotsi returned to Port Elizabeth in 1950 to take up a temporary teaching job at Newell High School, where he worked as an unqualified high
school teacher and earned a mere £12 a month. After a year in Port Elizabeth he returned to Fort Hare, this time to the Department of Education
to study for a professional teacher’s qualification. He now remembered
Dr Kerr’s words: ‘Get a professional certificate and go and teach amongst
your people.’ He resented that kind of thinking because it set the bar so
low for Africans. But he now felt that qualifying as a teacher was not such
a bad idea.
During this year he made contact with the educational anthropologist
Professor Otto Raum, whom he had met when applying for the museum
job.34 Mqotsi discussed his thesis with Raum and his disappointment
at not managing to complete it to the satisfaction of the examiners. He
spoke of his desire to become an academic and researcher working in
a university. Raum said he should return to his field-sites, continue his
fieldwork and perhaps change his registration to anthropology. Raum
seemed convinced that there was enough in Mqotsi’s topic to suggest
that it had the potential to be upgraded to a Ph.D. Following Raum’s
advice, Mqotsi returned to Middledrift during his university breaks to
revisit the healers, attend séances and meet communities in the Debe
Nek area. By the end of 1951 he was convinced he had filled some of the
gaps in his knowledge, wanted to shift his registration from psychology to
social anthropology, and thought about upgrading his registration from
a Masters to a Ph.D.
33
34
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 4 November 2008.
Otto F. Raum, Chaga Childhood: A Description of Indigenous Education in an East African
Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1940).
The volume was reprinted in 1952 and 1961, and again in 1996 with a new introduction
by Sally Falk Moore.
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However, before the end of the year he was offered a position on the
staff of Healdtown (Methodist) Training School, which was both a high
school and a teacher training college. Mqotsi remained ambivalent about
the Healdtown job because he really wanted to continue pursuing his
research and academic career. He complained to Monica after only four
months there.
Healdtown is not a very stimulating place intellectually. It is a small rather
secluded community, where everyone knows everyone else’s comings and
goings. Relations are intense and hence conflicts, stresses and strains are
quite rampant here. I am not speaking merely about relations between
African members of staff, on the one hand, and European members, on
the other. I am thinking particularly of intra-group relations. And if you
are a newcomer, you are viewed with great suspicion for no other reason
than that you may be cherishing new ideas!35
In this letter to Monica, who was by then the Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, he reflected for the first time
in his correspondence with her on why he had struggled with his Masters thesis in 1949. ‘I now realize my difficulty (a) I rushed over it and
(b) I did not have a clear conception of what a thesis ought to look like.
Now I have been able to read through a number of theses and I think
that has helped me a lot.’36 He also explained that he had returned to
the field in 1951 and enclosed a questionnaire he had designed to document the nature and extent of witchcraft beliefs among the Xhosa. The
questionnaire covered a wide range of beliefs about witches and asked
respondents to agree or disagree with over a hundred propositions about
the power and action of witches. The list included such detailed enquiries
as: ‘When the teats of a cow are cut would you suspect a baboon [that
carries witches] might have been milking it?’ or ‘When you have pains
between your shoulders do you think it is because the impundulu [lightning bird] . . . is kicking you?’ or ‘Do more people die from witchcraft
in your area than from natural causes?’. In designing the questionnaire
Mqotsi was clearly seeking to address the charge made against his thesis
in 1949 that the evidence was too anecdotal and not systematic enough
to be scientific.
While Mqotsi dreamed of completing his teaching qualification and
Ph.D. and moving into an academic research job, Healdtown was his
daily reality. He complained that he soon became unpopular among the
Christian management at Healdtown because he was not a practising
believer. The Healdtown authorities also did not like his unconventional
teaching techniques, where he ran his classes as a debating society. He
35
36
WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 15 Dec.
1952.
Ibid.
Witchcraft and the Academy
241
devised an entirely new syllabus for the teachers which seemed ‘too political’ for the school leadership. To make matters worse, he was regarded
as one of the heroes of the students in the hostel riots at the school in
1953. The student activists saw him as an ally and would come to his
classroom for advice. They were aware that he had established himself
through his work in the Cape African Teachers’ Association (CATA) as
one of the leading critics of the proposed new Bantu Education system,
the apartheid government’s much-hated system of segregated and inferior
education for Africans. In 1952 CATA mounted a campaign against the
Eiselen Commission’s recommendations on Bantu Education, while its
mother body, the All African Convention, focused more on criticising the
Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 and the associated rehabilitation measures
introduced in the reserves. Together with others including A. C. Jordan,
Leo Sihlala and his close friend Nathaniel Honono, Mqotsi was at the
forefront of this campaign against Bantu Education.37 He prepared a
lengthy submission to the Eiselen Commission in 1952 criticising the
political, educational and philosophical foundations of Bantu Education.
He presented two significant formal addresses on the topic, the first at
the 1953 CATA conference and the second at the 1954 All Africa Convention conference, both held in Queenstown.38
Mqotsi was evidently one of the ‘coming boys’ in the politics of noncollaboration and African unity in the early 1950s, a major strategist and
intellectual in CATA and the Unity Movement. Skilled as an orator and
public speaker, he wrote many of the key speeches and over time he
held senior positions in the Unity Movement. His political profile and
orientation made his Healdtown employers nervous, especially the headmaster Mr Pitts. Mqotsi began getting the sense that it was time to move
on: he did not see a future for himself in Bantu Education. When he
saw an advert for a research position as an industrial psychologist in the
Personnel Institute of the Chamber of Mines in 1953, he decided to
apply. Pitts encouraged him. His referees included Monica and Z. K.
Matthews. To his surprise and after a long wait, he was offered the job,
starting in April 1954 in a section of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research serving the Chamber of Mines.
The Witches of Academia, 1954–1957
So it was that in early 1954 Mqotsi took his family and possessions to
645 First Street in the new Payneville location in Springs on the Reef.
37
38
African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), ‘Tribute to Leo Sihlali
(1915–89)’, APDUSA Newsletter, April 1989, 4.
Ciraj Shahid Rassool, ‘Writing, Authorship and I. B. Tabata’s Biography: From Collective Leadership to Presidentialism’, Kronos: Southern African Histories, Special Issue:
Making Histories, ed. Ciraj Shahid Rassool and Leslie Witz, 34 (2008), 205.
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He recalled that his initiation into the Reef location environment was
traumatic. He was grilled by racist Afrikaners at the pass office who were
used to dealing with migrant workers and not educated Africans. He
never forgot the way he was deliberately humiliated there. This feeling
was exacerbated at work, where he felt like a fish out of water. He was
supposed to be involved in occupational testing on the mines, exploring
how workers adapted to their new environment by using a combination
of psychological tests and anthropological research methods. He was still
learning the ropes and felt uncomfortable with the procedure of submitting his data to senior scientists for scrutiny and analysis. He felt confident
that he could analyse his own data and clashed with his supervisors over
this issue. But these disagreements were minor, so one can imagine the
shock he felt when after only six weeks, in the middle of May 1954, he
received a letter from his supervisor Dr Hudson informing him that he
was to be dismissed. He was told that the Chamber of Mines had raised
certain ‘objections’ to his presence at the Institute. He later inquired
and found that no such objections had ever been made by the Chamber.
He wrote to Z. K. Matthews from Payneville in June 1954 and a month
later drafted a letter to Monica, this time from the Transkei. In his letter
to Z. K. he asked politely whether there might not be some position for
him at Fort Hare. In his letter to Monica he sounded more despondent
and openly wondered whether moving fully into politics might not be the
best route for him, given the way he had been treated by the gatekeepers
of the academy, these ‘witches of academia’. I quote from the latter half
of his three-page, single-spaced typed letter.
It is when things like this happen that one is sometimes persuaded to
give up academic pursuits altogether, to cross the Rubicon and enter fully
into political life, so that if one suffers one should at least be able to say
that one has done one’s duty. For however much an African may try to
restrain his feelings about things in a country like South Africa, where
even to raise a voice against the complete retardation of the education of
our children is a crime, the penalties of being black are sure to overtake
him.
As it is my future is already seriously at stake. Accustomed as we are
to think of scientific organizations as more responsible than politicians it
will be very difficult for people to believe that the CSIR, with its known
personnel, could deal so shabbily with anyone. It is common knowledge
that people who had actually been named under the anti-Red Act were,
nevertheless, given a chance to look for employment elsewhere, and were
not just turned out on the street. But then they were white and therefore
a different set of moral standards had to be used.
I have already suffered the repercussions of the CSIR stigma. When I left
them, I applied to the Anglo-American Corporation for a job. They seemed
eager to take me, but when I went to them for an interview they naturally
wanted to know what I was doing and what jobs I had held. I explained
everything, but not even this could help me wish away the suspicion.
Witchcraft and the Academy
243
I shall leave the Transvaal on Monday for the Cape, in order to take my
family to my in-laws in the Transkei. I shall leave them there while I am
still looking for a job. Our furniture we shall leave behind until we can see
what to do about it.
Thank you very much for your article on witchcraft [‘Witch Beliefs and
Social Structure’]. I found it very interesting. I also caught hold of the
report on the Keiskamma Survey. It makes interesting reading. I’ve also
been reading Radcliffe-Brown on social structure, taboo and functionalism.
Another book I found extremely interesting is the one by Wach called ‘The
Sociology of Religion’. I also came across Mrs Krige’s D. Litt. thesis.
Yours sincerely
L. Mqotsi39
Mqotsi knew where to turn in his time of trial: to Nathaniel Honono
at Nqabara Secondary School in Idutywa. In those days, he recalled,
‘priests rather than politicians were the heads of school boards’ and ‘it
was still possible for me to get a temporary appointment as a teacher in
the Transkei without too much government interference. My wife’s uncle
was on a local school board and the school was close to her home at
Nqamakwe’.40 But Mqotsi knew his days under Bantu Education were
numbered because of his profile as an anti-apartheid leader in CATA
and the Unity Movement. In fact, in 1955 he (along with many others)
was prohibited from entering the premises of any government school
in ‘white’ South Africa. His career as a teacher there had come to an
abrupt end.
Towards the end of 1955, Mqotsi got wind of a new set of opportunities
that had been created through the Institute of Social and Economic
Research at Rhodes University (ISER). Two research fellowships were
offered for Africans, to be supported by the Nuffield Foundation. One
was a two-year post with Professor Raum of Fort Hare to study rural
education in the Eastern Cape. Raum knew Mqotsi well and would
certainly have been keen for him to get the job, except that he was
now no longer allowed onto school premises and this would inhibit his
effectiveness as a fieldworker. The second position was for a Xhosaspeaking graduate in social anthropology to work on questions of morality
among the Xhosa with Professor Philip Mayer, Monica’s successor in
the chair of the Anthropology Department at Rhodes. Mqotsi was well
qualified, especially given his work on healing and witchcraft. He asked
Monica for a reference and was invited for an interview with Professor
Mayer, who immediately offered him the job at a more senior level than
39
40
Letter, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 15 June 1954, shown to the author by
Mqotsi at his home in October 2008. It is included in his personal papers, which are
now a special collection in the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre at the
University of Fort Hare.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 4 November 2008.
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the one advertised. He felt excited at the prospect of joining the ISER
and working towards his Ph.D. under Mayer’s supervision.
To his dismay he was suddenly informed, early in 1956, that Rhodes
University had now decided to rescind its job offer. The vice-chancellor,
Alty, had vetoed his appointment because (as in the later and much
more widely known case of Archie Mafeje’s rejection by the University
of Cape Town in 1968) Rhodes had been threatened by the government.
A statement issued by the external mission of the Unity Movement from
its offices in Lusaka in 1965, published in the APDUSA newsletter and
presumably written by a now exiled Mqotsi himself, explained the circumstances.
The University of Rhodes in Grahamstown offered him a post as a Senior
Research Officer. When his impending appointment became known, the
officials of the Native Affairs Department together with the Broederbond
who held high positions in the scientific field made strong objections to
his appointment declaring that that this man had been dismissed by the
highest scientific research body in the country for his political beliefs and
activities. As a result work never started there.41
Back to the Middledrift Healers, 1956–1957
By 1956 Mqotsi had few options left. He was no longer able to work as
a teacher in a government school. He had been prevented from securing academic jobs by virtue of his political profile and the failure of a
white liberal institution, Rhodes University, to oppose the threats of the
apartheid state. The temptation, as he expressed it to Monica, was to
leave academia behind and submerge himself in a life of politics. However, he also felt that he owed it to himself, his family and all those who
had supported him intellectually, especially Monica, to finish his Middledrift ethnography. Returning to the study and completing it in a fashion
that did justice to all the hard work he had put into it since the late
1940s became his main priority in 1956 and 1957. He braved poverty
and hardship to get his revised manuscript completed.
His immersion in the work came after a meeting with Dr Mervyn
Jeffreys and his colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand in mid1956, where he received detailed commentary on the newly reworked
chapters he had drafted.42 Not counting the ad hoc support he had got
from Monica, this was the only formal supervisory session Mqotsi ever
received on his Middledrift study. He was excited and wrote to Monica
about some of the issues they had discussed. One of his concerns was that
Dr Jeffreys insisted he make a clear distinction between witchcraft and
41
42
APDUSA Newsletter, 1965.
For details about Mervyn Jeffreys, see Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 202–203.
Witchcraft and the Academy
245
sorcery. Mqotsi told Monica he disagreed with this because the ‘Xhosa
themselves do not make this distinction’ and ‘they have no words in their
language to separate these phenomena’.43 He reminded Monica of her
telling him to try understanding his topic the way the local people did
themselves – ‘truth’, she famously insisted, was ‘in the field’.44 Monica
wrote back saying that while there is no clear distinction in the Xhosa
language, he would indeed be wise to make the distinction in his thesis.
Mqotsi conceded the point and would express it thus in his text.
Although the Xhosa do not make any verbal distinction between witchcraft
and sorcery, they do however differentiate between one who specializes in
witchcraft, associated with familiars such as the thikoloshe, baboon, impundulu [bird], and the ability to fly at night by means of a mysterious khetshi
(a cage); and one that uses malevolent medicines and ritual, which are
socially disapproved, whether used for social or individual purposes. The
former I call witchcraft, the latter sorcery.45
He goes on to argue that witchcraft is never really ‘practised’ among
the Xhosa whereas sorcery is, in the sense that actual magical medicines, herbs and concoctions are placed in food, drink or houses to effect
changes in perception and behaviour. There is a materiality to sorcery, he
argued, that is not there for witch beliefs. His study provided a detailed
list of the medicinal plants and herbs used by healers to heal and conjure
magic.
After re-analysis and redrafting in 1956, Mqotsi submitted the new
thesis to the University of the Witwatersrand in February 1957. Most
of its 17 chapters were ten to fifteen single-spaced pages long. The early
study had matured into a monumental work that tried to blend the insight
of anthropological studies of religion, healing and the occult with perspectives and approaches from psychology. It begins by tackling Fraser
and Malinowski on matters of magic, science and religion before arriving
at a set of working definitions for the key terms and concepts. On his
methodology, he notes: ‘I collected my data by joining the life of the
people among whom I was working, attending their ceremonies, dances,
initiations, beer drinking parties, church services concerts, public meetings, divination sessions and so forth.’46 In the end, he says, he spent nine
months in the field interviewing people and attending local gatherings
and events, as well as collecting genealogies and life histories. Most of
this time was spent in the village of Mnqaba, a little over six kilometres
43
44
45
46
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 26 January 2009.
Monica Wilson, ‘ . . . So Truth Be in the Field . . . ’ (The Alfred and Winifred Hoernlé
Memorial Lecture, Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1975).
The thesis, entitled ‘A Study of Ukuthwasa: Being a Syndrome Recognised by the Xhosa
as a Qualification for Being Initiated as a Doctor’, was submitted for a Masters degree
in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in February 1957.
Ibid., 16.
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from Debe Nek station in Middledrift. He claims to have visited healers
in about half of the 40 villages in the Debe Nek area, which had a total
population of some 25,000 people in the late 1940s. He explained that
most of his fieldwork was done during 1948 and 1949, but return visits
to the field were undertaken in 1951, 1952 and also in 1956. In 1953 he
had designed a detailed questionnaire on healing and witch beliefs that
he administered to pupils and staff at Mnqaba Higher Mission School in
Middledrift and to his trainee teachers at Healdtown.47
The thesis is well written, empirically detailed and clearly argued, and
has since been published as a book with a foreword by the South African
writer Es’kia Mphaphlele.48 It remains a mystery why Dr Jeffreys did
not recommend it for a Ph.D. when he saw the extent of the empirical
work involved and the sophistication of the argument. In the context of
witchcraft studies at the time, the perspective adopted by Mqotsi is also
very interesting and original. Having been ‘brought up’, intellectually
speaking, under Monica’s direction, and remembering her lectures on
the social functions of witchcraft, as well as her 1951 article on the
contrast between Pondo and Nyakyusa witchcraft,49 he was alert to
the relationship between witchcraft and social structure. Monica related
witch beliefs and accusations to the structural feature of clan exogamy
in Xhosa society. Mqotsi went further to argue that Xhosa society was,
in fact, underpinned by deep-seated and pervasive structural contradictions that encouraged conflict and anxiety. He developed a perspective
that placed conflict at the centre of his argument. On gender relations he
arrived at the following conclusion after long and detailed discussion.
From the foregoing discussion it is clear that the women are exposed most
of all to frustration. They are denied equality of status with the men; their
sexual desires are curbed; their marriage is uncertain; when they marry
they are practically homeless since their own families hand them over to the
husband’s family, where they are regarded as strangers; they are ordered
about by mother-in-law and sister-in-law in one breath and accused of
witchcraft (ukugqwira or ukuthakatha) in another; they are denied pleasure
at any rate for some time, being assigned to the most unpleasant role of
assiduousness; they are hemmed in on all sides with avoidance taboos,
restrictions and customs. In a word, marriage throws . . . a veil of inhibition
between her and many an avenue of ‘social gain’.50
It is not merely clan exogamy that creates tensions here but the entire system of gender relations. He explains that, rather than being characterised
by social equilibrium and harmony, traditional Xhosa society is fraught
47
48
49
50
Ibid., 18.
Livingstone Mqotsi, A Study of Ukuthwasa (East London: Iqula, 2007 [1957]), 16.
Monica Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56,
4 (1951), 307–313.
Mqotsi, A Study of Ukuthwasa, 44.
Witchcraft and the Academy
247
with tension and anxiety, and it is precisely this aspect that generates and
encourages witchcraft and sorcery.
The point I am trying to make here is that the relationship between a
large number of categories of individuals in Xhosa society is calculated to
give rise to emotional conflict and that conflict is the basis for all forms of
neurotic behaviour. I suggest that the intensity of beliefs in witchcraft and
sorcery accusation in Xhosa society, on the one hand, and the need for
diviners and ritual specialists, on the other, are related to the prevalence of
anxiety neuroses in this society.51
Later he points out that the essence of witchcraft and sorcery is conflict. But he also says that the beliefs regulate conflict and ensure that
the person does not get too angry, too jealous or too rich. They enforce
self-regulation. At the end of the book he returns to this theme, suggesting that, far from eradicating witchcraft and sorcery, ‘the chances are
that the industrial, scientific and technological development which has
drawn the African into the orbit of western institutions, simulations and
frustrations, will prove to be one of the most veritable sources of anxiety
and conflict, and this may well increase the incidence of witchcraft and
sorcery accusation’.52
Mqotsi was drawing on his own research in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth in the 1940s, where he had lived in a community seeking spiritual
security in the midst of the deep and pervasive uncertainties of social
change and modernity in the city. In his 1946 study of the Limba Church,
he noted that accusations of witchcraft actually seemed to have increased
there and one of the challenges for the leaders of the Limba Church was
to discourage accusations of witchcraft. The Church leaders insisted that
those who see the impundulu (lightning bird) and the hili (hobgoblin)
bring them to the preacher on a leash to be dealt with in church.53 If they
failed to do so, which was always the case, the matter was dismissed by
the bishop.
The background knowledge of the urban context in his thinking about
witchcraft and illness pushed his analysis beyond existing functionalist
models. He wrote that witchcraft was an ‘island of irrationality’ in the
countryside, but was pervasive and far-reaching in the city – and so
required a more general sociological and psychological explanation than
the culturally specific accounts that anthropology tended to provide. It
is this dilemma, I believe, that drew Mqotsi to psychology in the first
place, with its more universal modes of explanation, and also explains
his intellectual shuttling between the disciplinary perspectives of psychology and anthropology. If his first attempt at exploring ukuthwasa
51
52
53
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 193. See also my analysis of this in Chapter 3, this volume.
See Mqotsi and Mkele, ‘A Separatist Church’, 124–125.
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Inside African Anthropology
was unconvincing within psychology, his second attempt at the thesis
proved to be a subtle blend of perspectives from his two main disciplinary
orientations.
Thus in his treatment of ukuthwasa (the illness that provokes a calling
to heal) he suggests that, while the links between the ancestor cult and
the call to heal and be healed are important, we should not forget that
‘ukuthwasa is essentially a manifestation of a psychological disturbance’.
He specifically links dreaming and schizophrenia to the calling of ukuthwasa. He suggests that ‘stripped of its magical and mythical trappings
there can be no doubt about the genuineness of the ability of certain
people to recognise beyond the range of what we have grown to regard
as normal cognition’.54
Mqotsi sought to draw conclusions that extended beyond the frame
of reference of the particular society and setting he was studying. For
instance, he paid attention to Jack and Eileen Krige’s general assertion
that witchcraft and sorcery among the Lovedu serve to ‘pardon the unpardonable’ and also argued that counter-magic is very powerful because it
goes further than allowing people to believe they are able to counter
misfortune by getting the correct antidote from the healer. There is an
emotional satisfaction, he feels, which comes with explaining the inexplicable through witchcraft. He, interestingly, concludes this discussion
by arguing that witch beliefs do not simply have social or psychological
functions and effects but remain ‘a reality in their own right and have
their own logic, which provides those who espouse them with a philosophy of life and a theory of psychology’. He goes on to claim, beyond
the anthropological canon of the time, that witch beliefs are not only a
response to conflict or structural disequilibrium in a social system, but
can themselves be generative of conflict and social change.55
In addition to these important arguments, the text contains a wealth
of empirical detail on individual diviners and healers, and describes the
process involved in becoming a healer. Here he discusses whether the
calling to divination is hereditary, a tradition perpetuated within particular families, or whether the process of entry is more socially open and
unstructured. He comments in detail on the content of the training and
the different types of traditional healers he encountered in the Debe Nek
area. Mqotsi adds a comprehensive list and account of medicinal plants
and herbs used by healers and the various properties associated with
them. There is a scientific thoroughness and detail here that is impressive and valuable.
In his conclusion, Mqotsi quotes the Victorian anthropologist Edward
B. Tylor to the effect that ‘as men’s minds change in progressing
54
55
Mqotsi, A Study of Ukuthwasa, 192.
Ibid., 63.
Witchcraft and the Academy
249
cultures, old customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and uncongenial atmosphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new life
around them.’ This prompts him to comment that many forms of irrationality continue to lie embedded in modern society. They are not always
as easily detectable as Xhosa accusations of witchcraft. Forms of racism
that justify irrational behaviour against people classified as ‘inferior barbarians’, Jews, niggers and Communists were still common in so-called
modern progressive societies. He insists that ‘the determining factors of
this type of behaviour are the same as those that operate behind the nightmarish vendettas against witches and sorcerers’.56 Mqotsi’s call here is
not only to displace the social anxiety, conflict and dysfunction associated
with witchcraft, but to remove the ‘existence of primitive forms of life
and thought’ (such as those that underpinned apartheid) as a pervasive
form of irrationality induced by anxiety, akin to ‘the continued belief in
sorcery and witchcraft’.57 In writing these words there is no doubt that
Mqotsi was reflecting on his own experience of the irrationalities of the
apartheid system and how he had suffered from these blind prejudices,
both as a citizen and an intellectual.
In the 1951 essay on witchcraft discussed above, Monica had declared
that witch beliefs were the ‘standardized nightmare of the group’.58
Her article had set out to demonstrate the connections between belief
in witchcraft and aspects of social structure amongst the Nyakyusa of
Tanzania and the Pondo of the Eastern Cape. Monica argued that the
fear of witchcraft, or its social equivalent, served as a powerful sanction
against antisocial behaviour in all societies, and that such beliefs helped
to enforce social conformity. She presented the idea that the witch was a
scapegoat, a mechanism for social exclusion and vilification. She sent a
copy of this essay to Mqotsi in 1954 when he had become the victim of
an apartheid-driven witch-hunt aimed at keeping him out of schools and
preventing him from securing an academic position in a South African
university. While he did not write directly about his experience of ‘witchcraft in the academy’ in his Middledrift thesis of 1957, he certainly felt
the power of state sorcery at this time. He had been formally banned
from entering the premises of any school in the South Africa and, soon
after, was effectively excluded from the university system. The rejection
at Rhodes University was a critical moment. It was his final chance to
realise his dream of becoming an anthropological researcher in South
Africa. Had Mqotsi been allowed to take the job at Rhodes, he would
surely have converted his Middledrift study into a Ph.D. and been able to
launch his academic career. As we have seen, he never got the post – but
56
57
58
Ibid., 191.
Ibid., 191.
Monica Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, 313.
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denial did not stop him completing, in 1957, what remains a significant
anthropology study.
The Later Years, 1957–2009
Cruelly, this achievement marked the end rather than the beginning of
his academic career. Pushed out of the formal education system in South
Africa, Mqotsi could not be employed at any school or university and
was effectively banished to the Transkei, where he managed to negotiate
his return into ‘white’ South Africa on a labourer’s pass in 1957. In East
London he set up and edited two newspapers, Ikwezi Lomso (Morning
Star), the monthly newspaper of the Unity Movement in the city, and
Indaba Zase Monti (East London News), a weekly paper in English and
Xhosa that was produced from a warehouse in the city where his pass
book said he was employed as an ‘unskilled labourer’. These publications
bravely attacked and exposed apartheid policies and injustices, paying
special attention to developments in the Transkei and Ciskei reserves.
He was banned in 1960 and detained without trial in the crackdown
during the State of Emergency. His printing press was closed and his
newspapers outlawed in the political repression that followed the shift to
armed struggle in the liberation movements.
He then retrained as a lawyer in East London (1961–3) and joined
an African-run firm that took on some political cases. This was a period
of intense political mobilisation and the persecution of activists in East
London. When the South African police were closing in on him in 1964
he fled the country on an exit visa, first to Botswana and then to Lusaka in
Zambia, where he continued working as a political journalist and Unity
Movement organiser. He was employed as a teacher in Zambia.59 He
was a tireless writer and political critic, and a leading figure of the Unity
Movement in exile during the mid-1960s.
It was in this period, when his career as an anthropologist was dead
and buried, that Monica visited Mqotsi in Lusaka. She described him
as an unhappy man who had suffered a great deal as a result of political persecution and academic misfortune.60 Others who knew him there
described him as academically brilliant, an incisive thinker and a political opinion maker.61 The high esteem in which he was held by the
ANC leadership was reflected in their decision to allow him to act as a
59
60
61
Magubane, My Life and Times, 134.
WC, uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi, Monica Wilson/Livingstone Mqotsi, 12 May
1965, Cape Town.
See Ciraj Shahid Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa’
(Ph.D. thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2004).
Witchcraft and the Academy
251
mentor and ‘surrogate father’ to the charismatic Chris Hani in exile.62
In Lusaka, the young Chris Hani lived with Mqotsi, his wife and two
daughters, where he was said to hold political meetings in the backroom
while Mqotsi and his wife listened to ‘classical music and read poetry in
the main house’.63 Bernard Magubane, the distinguished South African
sociologist who made his career in the United States, writes in his recent
autobiography about meeting with Mqotsi in Lusaka in the late 1960s.
‘Mqotsi was exceptionally bright, one of the best teachers in Zambia, and
used to write all by himself this little monthly or bi-monthly newsletter,
Unity, which made a plea for unity amongst all the liberation movements.
I don’t know where he got the time.’64
Mqotsi remained in Zambia writing and teaching until the early 1970s,
when he took a job as a teacher in London. When he finally retired as
deputy headmaster in the 1990s, he wrote and published other books,
including a historical ethnography of the resistance movement to rehabilitation in the Transkei in the late 1950s and 1960s.65 He only returned
to South Africa in the 1990s, settling back in East London where he died
on 25 September 2009. On 6 May 2010 he was posthumously awarded
an honorary doctorate in the social sciences by the University of Fort
Hare.
Conclusion
In telling this story of Mqotsi and his persistence as an ethnographer, I
have emphasised the central role that Monica played in his development
as a young African anthropologist. As with Mafeje (Chapter 8), there
was little that Monica could have done to prevent the tragedy of Mqotsi’s
frustrated academic career. There was no way that the apartheid state was
going to allow a man with Mqotsi’s political profile and beliefs to secure
a position in the white academy in South Africa. Monica continued to
support his academic endeavours after the mid-1950s, although not as
directly as Mqotsi sometimes hoped. She was by far the most influential
figure in his development as an African intellectual and anthropologist in
the 1940s and 1950s. He would probably never have written the Limba
Church study in 1946 without wanting to prove himself to his respected
mentor, and would definitely not have produced his intriguing ethnography on the Middledrift healers without her early support and informal
62
63
64
65
See Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, Hani: A Life Too Short (Cape Town: Jonathan
Ball, 2009), 147–155.
Smith and Tromp, Hani, 148.
Magubane, My Life and Times, 134.
See Livingstone Mqotsi, House of Bondage (London: Karnak, 1991).
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supervision. The study makes a valuable contribution to the documentation of indigenous knowledge systems of the Xhosa people of the Eastern
Cape. The meticulous and detailed manner in which he documented the
activities and beliefs of Middledrift healers had a great deal to do with
how he had been trained by Monica. He paid generous tribute to her
in his speech at the centenary conference celebrating her life and work,
calling her ‘the most significant intellectual influence’ in his life.
One can only imagine what contribution Mqotsi might have made to
South African anthropology in terms of articles, books and ideas, had
he been writing African social science rather than teaching English and
history to teenagers in Zambia and England from the 1960s to the 1990s.
It is a great pity that an intellectual distance developed between Monica
and himself in the 1950s and that she could not closely supervise his
Middledrift study through to its completion. If this had happened, I am
sure that, as with the study of the Limba Church in the 1940s, this work
would not have had to wait half a century before getting published.
What I am also certain of is that the training Mqotsi received under
Monica had a lasting impact on his professional life as a political activist, teacher, journalist and writer. When he left anthropology to become
a political journalist in East London in the late 1950s he produced his
weekly paper, which was a kind of ethnography from below, documenting the stories of ordinary people and their experiences and resistance
to apartheid policies. Later, when he retrained as a lawyer in the 1960s,
he developed a keen interest in customary law and African indigenous
notions of democracy and justice, which stayed with him for many years.
Indeed, as he approached retirement in England in the late 1980s and
wanted to write a book again, he combined his political and anthropological interests in a historical novel, House of Bondage. In the novel he
returns to the draconian mechanism of the magistrate courts and the
decrees of the native commissioners in the rural Transkei, and to the
endless local struggles over chieftaincy, land and power recalled in so
many editions of Indaba Zase Monti and Ikwezi Lomso, and in his own
experiences of banishment in the Transkei in the 1950s and 1960s. House
of Bondage was published in England in 199166 and may be read as an
auto-ethnography. Together with the Limba Church study in the 1940s
and Middledrift healers ethnography of 1957, it constitutes an important
part of Mqotsi’s Monica-inspired anthropological contribution.
66
Ibid.
8
‘Speaking from Inside’: Archie Mafeje,
Monica Wilson and the Co-Production of
Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African
Township
Andrew Bank with Vuyiswa Swana
Archie Mafeje was the only one of Monica Wilson’s former research
assistants to establish a career as a university-based scholar.1 After working with Monica on Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township between 1960 and 1963, Mafeje went on to complete an MA in
social anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1964
and a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge under Audrey Richards in
1969.
Following the infamous rescinding of his appointment as senior lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology by the UCT senate in
1968, in what has become known as ‘the Mafeje Affair’,2 he took up
posts as senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of
Dar es Salaam in 1969, later becoming head of department, and then
as professor in the Institute of Social Sciences at the Hague in 1972, at
the age of just 36. He published a series of highly influential sociological essays and books from the 1970s onwards in the fields of development and agrarian studies, and the politics of social scientific knowledge
production in Africa. He died in Pretoria on 28 March 2007, but his
intellectual legacy is still very much alive. He was posthumously awarded honorary doctorates by UCT in 2008 and Walter Sisulu University
in 2010; a special issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin was published by
way of obituary in December 2008, entitled ‘A Giant Has Moved On:
Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’; and an edited collection is being produced
1
2
Thanks to Isaac Ntabankulu of UCT Manuscripts and Archives Department for many
months of following up and seeking out archival materials on Archie Mafeje, to Mafeje’s
friends and family who shared their memories with Andrew Bank (especially Nomfundo
Mafeje, Archie Nkonyeni, Fikile Bam, Ganief and Ghaaronisa Hendricks, and Margaret
Green) and to Adam Kuper, whose comments prompted a thorough rewriting of the
chapter.
See Fred T. Hendricks, ‘The Mafeje Affair: UCT, Apartheid and the Question of Academic Freedom’, African Studies, 67, 3 (2008), 432–452; for a critique of Hendricks’s
account of Monica Wilson’s role in Mafeje’s exclusion see Andrew Bank, Archie Mafeje:
The Life and Work of an African Anthropologist (1936–2007) (Alice: Fort Hare University
Press, 2010), 12, 31.
253
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on his work and legacy following a conference held at UCT in May
2011.3
This chapter returns to the beginning of Mafeje’s career as a social scientist and examines in detail his collaborative work with Monica Wilson
on Cape Town’s Langa township during his years as a student of social
anthropology at UCT. We examine the phases of knowledge production that went into the making of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an
African Township, that significant and undervalued contribution to South
African urban anthropology that was published under their joint names
by Oxford University Press in 1963 and re-issued in 1973.4 In particular
we argue for a fuller recognition of the importance of Mafeje’s fieldwork
between November 1960 and April 1962, and especially of his extended
field report.5 As John Sharp has noted, the Langa project was in considerable difficulty when Monica enlisted Mafeje as a research assistant in
1960. Sharp recommends that we relate the creative turn in the project
to the close personal relationship that developed between Monica and
Mafeje. Here he mentions his own experience of ‘the intriguing combination of scholarly erudition, regal bearing and personal vulnerability
that was manifested in the way she related to junior colleagues in whom
she took an interest’.6 Most importantly, he draws attention to Mafeje’s
status as an insider in Langa, being both a Xhosa-speaker and a NonEuropean Unity Movement activist working at a time of high political
turbulence in the township.
We explore in greater detail the complexities of the Mafeje–Wilson
relationship and the more exact ways in which Mafeje was able to position himself as an ‘insider ethnographer’. We are centrally concerned less
with the published text of Langa and Mafeje’s later retrospective reflections on the Langa project, published in a Monica Wilson Festschrift in
1975,7 than with Langa as a long-established anthropological field-site
with which Mafeje engaged in particular ways. We draw on three concepts
developed by Lyn Schumaker in Africanizing Anthropology: anthropology
3
4
5
6
7
On Mafeje’s career see Lungisile Ntsebeza, ‘Obituary: Archie Mafeje’, New Agenda, 27
(2007), 48–49; Adebayor Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds, CDDESRIA Bulletin:
Special Issue: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007): ‘A Giant Has Moved On’, Dec. 2008 (3 & 4).
Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township
(Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963; second impression
1973).
These materials are archived in the WC subsection on Langa as K3, Interviews and
Notes: Archie Mafeje.
John Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual’s Journey’ in Olukoshi and
Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 32.
Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’ in Michael Whisson and
Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa (Cape Town: David
Philip, 1975), 164–184.
‘Speaking from Inside’
255
as an activity in the field, anthropological social ‘networks’ defined in
a non-technical sense as ‘interaction that enabled the fieldwork to be
accomplished’ and interracial team research projects in African anthropology as instances of ‘the co-production of scientific knowledge’.8
The other central concern of this chapter is the importance of personal factors, including background, training and style, in the making of
cultural knowledge.9 Once we take more seriously the fieldwork interactions as the generator of anthropological knowledge, working from the
multiple social encounters on site rather than from the depersonalised
finished texts, it becomes apparent that the personality of the fieldworker
is crucial in this central phase of the process. This is particularly evident in the contrast that we draw between the failed fieldwork of A. R.
W. (Robin) Crosse-Upcott and the successful work of Archie Mafeje in
Langa.10 Personality is more than ever a vital factor when a study is
co-authored (as with Mafeje and Monica here) and is the product of
ongoing discussions over a period of years, with the relationship between
the researchers changing.11 In order to reconstruct the personal background, training and the social (and thus associated fieldwork) style of
Archie Mafeje we have drawn on the memories of Vuyiswa Swana, his
younger sister and closest in age of his younger siblings,12 and on oral
interviews with other family members and friends conducted by Andrew
Bank. As for the changing relationship between Mafeje and Monica, we
draw on an extensive correspondence which began during his first month
of fieldwork in Langa and continued through his UCT student years and
beyond.13
Who Wrote Langa?
Reconstructing the relative contributions to Langa of the three primary
researchers on the project has been complicated by a long-standing
debate about the politics of its authorship. Archie Mafeje is identified
as a full co-author on the book’s cover. Robin Crosse-Upcott would have
been listed as the book’s third author had he taken up Monica’s overly
8
9
10
11
12
13
Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, esp. 246–259.
See Chapter 1 for discussion of this theme in relation to Monica Hunter Wilson.
John Sharp also refers to this contrast but we go into greater detail about their working
styles, based on a close study of the fieldnotes and field reports of both researchers. See
Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 31.
For the standard textual approach, see especially Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters.
Vuyiswa was born in 1940. Archie (born in 1936) had five other siblings: Mbulezi (born
in 1942), Khumbuzo (1944), Mzandile (1947), Thozama (1949) and Nandipha (1954).
WC, K1.2, Correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 1961–1962; ibid., uncat. corr., Correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 1960–1979 (includes some corr. with family members).
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Inside African Anthropology
generous offer.14 Her Acknowledgements, written in April 1963, point to
a hierarchy of roles corresponding to the academic status of each scholar.
Field work was carried out by Dr. A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott from July
1955 until March 1957, and by Mr Archie Mafeje, who is himself Xhosaspeaking, intermittently between November 1961 and September 1962.
The formulation of the problems, the direction of the field work, and the
writing of the book was done by Professor Monica Wilson.15
Draft versions of this paragraph suggest that Monica was either genuinely unsure about the details or dithered about how best to convey an
impression of ‘ethnographic authority’ in a study that relied most heavily
(as we shall see) on a researcher who was still an undergraduate student
when he began fieldwork. In one draft Monica leaves out the titles and
dates; in another she records the period of Mafeje’s fieldwork as having
ended in February 1962. An accurate statement would record that his
fieldwork was fairly continuous and ran from November 1960 through
to March 1962, a period of seventeen rather than ten months. In the
case of Crosse-Upcott, the Acknowledgements exaggerate his role. His
fieldwork was brief, being confined to little more than the six months
between July and December 1955, and it was ineffective too.16 There is
also the question of how much of the final text depended on Mafeje given
the extent of reliance on his field report, as we discuss later.
Partly because of this misleading formulation, but also because of
Monica’s now well-established international reputation as a social anthropologist, most reviewers referred to the book as ‘Wilson’s study’ or ‘Professor Wilson’s study’. In a congratulatory review published in African
Studies in 1963, Desmond Reader made no mention at all of Archie
outside of the listed book title. He praised ‘Wilson’s compact and direct
style’, attributing to her even those sections of the book like the ‘excellent
analysis of home-boy relationships’ that most obviously drew on Archie’s
research.17 For the American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker,
14
15
16
17
Crosse-Upcott, rightly as we shall see, turned down the offer on the grounds that ‘I have
had no hand in the real work involved.’ WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence between
Monica Wilson and Robin Crosse-Upcott; ibid., A. R. Crosse-Upcott/Monica Wilson,
9 April 1962, Locust Control Office, Abercorn, Northern Rhodesia. We are grateful to
Seán Morrow for directing us to the uncatalogued folder of correspondence between
Monica and Crosse-Upcott.
Monica Wilson, ‘Acknowledgements’ in Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa, vii.
WC, K7, Drafts and Langa Transcripts.
Desmond H. Reader, ‘Review of Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township’,
African Studies, 22, 4 (1963), 190–191. Reader produced the first study in the ‘Xhosa in
Town’ trilogy, The Black Man’s Portion: History, Demography and Living Conditions in the
Native Locations of East London, Cape Province (Cape Town: Oxford University Press for
the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, 1961). We should
read his comments partly in relation to his own highly dismissive attitude towards his
African research assistants as expressed in the methodological appendix to his book:
‘Speaking from Inside’
257
the failings of Langa rather than its merits were laid squarely at Monica’s
door. Powdermaker contrasted the book with Monica Wilson’s earlier
‘classics’ on the grounds that good ethnographic writing is impossible
if one has not done the fieldwork oneself. (The preceding essays in this
volume have shown quite how extensively she had relied on the fieldwork
of others in her earlier projects as well.) She criticised Langa for its limited engagement with the more dynamic aspects of African urban culture
in the mid-twentieth century,18 something she herself had been so successful at documenting in her recently published Copper Town: Changing
Africa.19 A less eminent critic, writing in the Journal of Modern African
Studies in 1967, again identified the book as ‘Professor Wilson’s Langa’,
comparing it unfavourably with Sheila van der Horst’s African Workers
in Town, a product of the UCT urban studies project from which Langa
had developed.20
Mafeje’s claims to authorship changed over time. By the early 1970s
he had come to distance himself from the book, something we associate
with his increasingly critical attitude towards social anthropology as a
field of study. In a handwritten inscription on the title page of the newly
published second issue of Langa, dated to 1974, he dedicated the book
to his second wife Shahida el Baz as ‘an affirmation of our belief in
historical transformation and as a testimony to my youthful follies’.21 In
an essay written a year later, he hinted at the limitations of Monica’s
theoretical framework and underlying Christian liberal ideology.22 Then,
in his famous debate with Sally Falk Moore two decades later, Mafeje
distanced himself emphatically from the liberal social anthropologists of
the British school including the Wilsons, whose ‘major crime was eurocentrism’, but ironically made fuller claim to co-authorship than he had
in his 1975 essay: ‘In undertaking Langa we avoided what we thought
was a procedural error on the part of the Mayers’, noting later on the
use of the term ‘tribe’: ‘I might have prevailed upon Monica Wilson
18
19
20
21
22
‘In short, they had to be not too intelligent, and yet intelligent enough to complete the
survey forms’ (169).
Hortense Powdermaker, ‘Review of Langa’, American Anthropologist, 66, 5 (1964),
1199–1201.
Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the
Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). See especially her fascinating
exploration of the responses of townsmen in Northern Rhodesia to new forms of urban
media, notably film, radio and newspapers.
H. M. Jones, ‘Review of Langa, The Second Generation and African Workers in Town’,
Journal of Modern African Studies, 5, 1 (1967), 157–158.
The note is dated 1974. Inscription on the title page of the copy of Langa (1973 edition)
in Archie Mafeje’s private library, Africana Library, Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha.
Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’ in Michael Whisson and
Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa (Cape Town: David
Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1975), 164–184. See Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’ for an
analysis of his changing attitude towards social anthropology.
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Inside African Anthropology
not to do the same [use the term] in Langa.’23 Mafeje’s reflections in
hindsight exaggerate the degree of intellectual equality between Monica
and himself at a stage when he was just beginning his graduate studies
and she was a senior professor with a very well established international
reputation. As we explain later, he came to social anthropology as a failing
science student and his correspondence with Monica during his Langa
fieldwork reveals a vulnerability and anxiety to please on his part, which
these later reminiscences conveniently suppress.
The authorship debate has been taken up again in the years since
Mafeje’s death, most notably in the articles published in the obituary issue
of the CODESRIA Bulletin. Sociologist Jimmy Adesina challenges Falk
Moore’s riposte on the grounds that it ‘hardly reflects well on her own
understanding of producing a manuscript. Authorship, if that is what this
confers on Monica Wilson, does not mean exclusivity of even the most
seminal ideas in a manuscript.’ He goes on to suggest that the ‘most
seminal ideas’ in the book, those articulating what he terms ‘the pursuit
of indigeneity’, came from Mafeje rather than Wilson.24 The editorial to
this special issue refers to Langa as ‘his [Mafeje’s] ethnography’, a view
the editors (mistakenly) attribute to John Sharp.25
The debate seems then to have come full circle. In the mid-1960s
we had the striking silencing of Archie Mafeje’s contribution in journal
reviews based in part on the formulation of the respective roles of fieldworkers and author in the book’s Acknowledgements. In the mid-1970s
Mafeje implicitly seemed to endorse this, but then began making greater
claims to authorship in the course of his debate with Sally Falk Moore
in the mid-1990s. Since his death, essays published in recent years have
recast Langa as Mafeje’s ‘masterly ethnography’ and Mafeje rather than
Monica Wilson has been credited with the book’s most ‘seminal ideas’.
We argue that the production of Langa is better seen as creative dialogue and co-production, rather than in terms of exclusive notions of
authorship, because Mafeje collected the bulk of field data that went into
the book and Monica did most of the writing. In Mafeje’s fieldwork,
beginning in November 1960, this dialogue took the form of his taking
Monica’s sets of questions and advice about anthropological interviewing methods into the field, and then of fortnightly progress reports that
were recorded in rough note form with new sets of questions for the next
23
24
25
Archie Mafeje, ‘A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa’, CODESRIA Bulletin, 2
(1996), 12. Falk Moore responded by citing the book’s Acknowledgements quoted
above.
Jimmy A. Adesina, ‘Against Alterity – The Pursuit of Endogeneity: Breaking Bread with
Archie Mafeje’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 and 4 (2008),
21–29.
Adebayo Olukoshi and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, ‘Editorial’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh,
eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 1–4.
‘Speaking from Inside’
259
stage of fieldwork. On the writing process, we will argue later that for
numerous sections of the book, the published text followed the formulations in Mafeje’s field report almost to the word, blurring the distinction
between fieldworker and author that the book’s Acknowledgements drew
rather too starkly.
Archie Mafeje and the Long History of the Langa
Project, 1936/7 to 1957
We need to set this dialogue in the context of Archie’s background and an
appreciation of the established networks in Langa that set him apart from
the numerous other UCT-based anthropologists who had done research
there. Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje was born on 30 March 1936
in a remote mountainous rural village in the Engcobo District of Thembuland, just a year before the newly appointed UCT lecturer in native law
and government, Jack Simons, began doing fieldwork in Langa. When
Simons introduced his graduate student Ruth Levin to Langa in 1945,26
Archie Mafeje was still a pupil at Gubenxa Junior School where his father
Bennett, a wealthy peasant farmer, was the headmaster. Mafeje did his
Junior Certificate at Nqabara Secondary School, a Methodist missionary
school in ‘the backwaters of Willowvale District, close to the sea’27 in
1951 and 1952, a few years after David Hammond-Tooke had submitted
his MA study on six independent Churches in Langa.28 Mafeje and his
fellow pupils were first introduced to the politics of the Non-European
Unity Movement by their headmaster at Nqabara, Nathaniel Honono,
whom we met in Chapter 6. Here Mafeje was a star pupil with a passion
for science subjects. His classmate Archie Nkonyeni records his first
impressions of Mafeje as a confident, straight-talking teenager, one who
was ‘tall, dark and ruggedly handsome’. Mafeje was ‘a civilizing factor’
at school. He liked to instruct his friends in table manners and dress
sense.29
Archie and Nkonyeni were in their matric year at Healdtown Missionary College near Fort Beaufort (see Figure 8.1) when Monica, the newly
26
27
28
29
There is a striking contrast between the atmosphere in Langa during the time of Levin’s
six months of fieldwork and a decade later when Robin Crosse-Upcott entered Langa.
For a sense of the more benevolent politics of research in the pre-apartheid period,
see Ruth Levin’s M.A. thesis (1945), later published as a book under the same title,
Marriage in Langa Native Location (Cape Town: University of Cape Town School of
African Studies, 1947), 1–8.
Archie Nkonyeni, ‘Archie Mafeje’, Mafeje Panel Discussion, Anthropology Southern
Africa Conference, East London, 10 September 2010 (Stanley Baluku, Video of the
Panel Discussion, UCT Manuscript and Archives Department).
W. David Hammond-Tooke, ‘Six Native Churches: A Preliminary Survey of Religion
in an Urban Location’ (M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1948).
Nkonyeni, ‘Archie Mafeje’.
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Figure 8.1. Archie Mafeje (left) during his years at Healdtown Missionary College where he matriculated in 1954. Hudson Matabese (right) was another star
pupil who went with the two Archies from Nqabara to Healdtown, and then
later on to Fort Hare Native College. The trio of star students remained lifelong
friends.30
appointed professor and head of the Department of Social Anthropology, submitted a UCT team research funding proposal to the National
Council of Scientific Research for a project on ‘African Communities in
the Western Cape’. Given her success with African research assistants
as fieldworkers, from her time in Pondoland and Bunyakyusa through
to her work with Theresa Maki in the recently completed Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, Wilson proposed the appointment of five African
fieldworkers along with two senior researchers, Simons and the UCT
economist Sheila van der Horst (see also Figure 8.2, caption). Monica
thus saw no more than a distant supervisory role for herself at a time when
her own primary research commitment was to ongoing work of seeing the
Nyakyusa ethnographies through to completion. The amended proposal
recommended the appointment of only two African research assistants.
Wilson seems to have had Godfrey Pitje in mind as a possible candidate at
this early stage, as well as Nimrod Mkele, Livingstone Mqotsi’s one-time
research collaborator in Port Elizabeth.
Mafeje was a first year BSc student at Fort Hare Native College when
Robin Crosse-Upcott was introduced to Langa by Jack Simons in June
30
Vuyiswa Swana, private collection.
‘Speaking from Inside’
261
Figure 8.2. Monica (centre) and her colleagues at a Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) Conference in 1951. The other figures are (from left to right): A. J. B.
Hughes, J. Clyde Mitchell, Ian Cunnison, Hans Holleman, Victor Turner, Jack
Krige, Bubbles Hyam. The team research model of the RLI played an important role in shaping Monica’s planning of the Langa project in 1952–4, with its
proposal for the active involvement of African researchers enabled by ‘insider’
cultural knowledge.31
1955. Crosse-Upcott was in the final stages of writing up a doctoral
thesis on the ‘Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo-speaking Peoples’ in
Tanganyika, which Monica had supervised.32 When Mafeje was expelled
31
32
Photograph from J. Clyde Mitchell’s private collection. Reproduced with permission
from Jean Mitchell. This group photograph was first reproduced in Lyn Schumaker,
Africanizing Anthropology, 108. The names of the figures are taken from her book (except
for Monica whom she mistakenly took to be Elsey Richardson and the ‘unknown man’
whom we save identified as Jack Krige). The photographer was most likely Eileen
Krige. Thanks to Lyn for facilitating negotiations for permission and providing us
with an original print to scan. On the importance of African research assistants in the
RLI team projects, see also her article: Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Director as Significant
Other: Max Gluckman and Team Research at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute’ in
Richard Handler, ed., Significant Others: Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in
Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 91–130.
A. Robin W. Crosse-Upcott, ‘Social Structure of the ki-Ngindo-Speaking Peoples’
(D.Phil., University of Cape Town, 1956).
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from Fort Hare a year later for political activism on campus, the Langa
project was not going well. Crosse-Upcott had done a year of training as
an army cadet at Oxford in 1951 and had formerly worked as a colonial
administrator in Tanganyika. He appears to have approached his Langa
research as something of a military manoeuvre. His field reports reveal
that he had begun to think in terms of the need to work from ‘HQ’ in
order to begin ‘softening up’ or ‘pacifying’ informants, but was aware
that he should avoid ‘shock tactics’. In short, he had come to see Langa
as ‘a battle to be won’.33 Not surprisingly his fieldnotes are filled with
descriptions of ‘chilly receptions’ and accounts of months of frustration
in dealing with evasive, unpunctual or reluctant informants. He attended
only three social events during his time in Langa and found them less
than enjoyable. At the Christmas service of 1955 ‘the whole carnival
atmosphere appeared to me grotesque’. His notes of the Easter Day
service in 1956 read like a missionary’s account of pagan rituals with
references to a ‘cowering throng’ and ‘spell-bound’ worshippers.34 Even
the dynamic new young African jazz bands, the Tuxedo Slickers and the
City Jazz Kings, failed to impress him. ‘On the whole, it was a dreary
performance, excepting if viewed as satire. The performers looked like a
lot of circus-monkeys giving a slip-shod imitation to my mind.’35
While Wilson’s Acknowledgements suggest that Crosse-Upcott only
formally resigned from the Langa project in March 1957, we have found
no record of interviews that date beyond May 1956. His last nine months
on the project produced almost nothing and when he left for an administrative post in Tanganyika without having written up a final report, the
UCT supervisory committee was in despair.
Robertson [H. M., Professor of Economics]: He just learns enough to be
useful and then goes. It is a pure waste of time . . .
Simons: I wonder whether the National Council feels that we have been
negligent in appointing a man who did not finish the job.
Wilson: He was not particularly happy in urban work . . . I can only demand
that he have everything written up to date . . . I feel so discouraged about
the whole proceedings that I am not at all prepared to spend a great deal of
time on it. So much work has gone into it which has been quite useless.’36
When Crosse-Upcott’s final report did belatedly arrive, it was of little
value. Entitled ‘Social Harmony and Discord in an Urban Location’, the
findings were in keeping with his military model. His only substantive
33
34
35
36
WC, K2.1, Church Interviews, M–S, Methodist Church of South Africa, Rev. Teka,
23 Aug. 1955; ibid., Rev. Damane, 18 Jan. 1956.
Ibid., Rev. Teka, 1 April 1956.
WC, K2.3, Interviews with Clubs, Scopus Group concert, Darling Street, 30 October
1955.
WC, K1.1, Correspondence, Proposals, Reports etc., 1958–1962, Draft minutes,
3 June 1957.
‘Speaking from Inside’
263
chapter was a 30-page conclusion on ‘Discord’ in which he argued that,
despite a ‘surface impression of relative quietness and freedom from
open violence’, Langa township was in reality a seething bed of personal
and institutional feuds, a place of schisms, splintering and instability, an
altogether ‘boisterous state of affairs’.37
Mafeje’s Networks, 1958 to 1960
Crosse-Upcott’s failure as a fieldworker in Langa illuminates, by means
of the starkest of contrasts, the success of Mafeje’s insider networks as
well as, more generally, the importance of fieldworker attitudes towards
their ethnographic subjects. We need to locate Mafeje’s fieldwork in the
context of a web of social networks that he had established in the township
even before he began working there as a researcher in November 1960.
Mafeje enrolled for a BSc degree at UCT in 1957. African students
were in a tiny minority, numbering fewer than twenty out of a student
population of some five thousand throughout his student years.38 He
recalled how ‘as a biology student in the late 1950s at UCT I had been
taught the same [racist attitudes] by my white professors who nonetheless
regarded me as the “other”.’39 He came to social anthropology as a failing
BSc candidate rather than as a star student confidently equipped with
a BSc as some scholars have claimed.40 His student record reveals that
he passed only three of the twelve BSc courses for which he enrolled,41
suggesting that his switch to a BA and social anthropology in 1959 was
from necessity rather than choice.
He lived in Athlone in the late 1950s and moved to District Six in 1960,
but he had extensive contact with Langa during this period. He would
have heard stories about the township as a child. His father Bennett had
lived there and taught at Langa High School for some five years during
the mid-late 1930s, having first got to know Cape Town during his years
of work as chauffeur to a wealthy suburban family.42 His mother had also
lived in Langa when she worked as a schoolteacher in Cape Town, and
it is most likely that Langa was where his parents had married in 1934.
37
38
39
40
41
42
WC, K7, [A. R. W. Crosse-Upcott] ‘Social Harmony and Discord in an Urban Location’, typescript.
African students would remain under 1 per cent of the total student population until the
1980s. See Kate Honikman, ‘Processes and Problems: First-Year Students at a South
African University’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1982), Table 3.1, 51.
Archie Mafeje, ‘Africanity: A Commentary by Way of Conclusion’ republished in
Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA Bulletin: Special Issue, 15.
See Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 30; Fred T. Hendricks, ‘Editorial: A Brief Tribute to
Archie Mafeje’, African Sociological Review, 11, 1 (2007), 1–3.
UCT, University Archive, student record of Archie Mafeje (1957–1964), transcript, 1.
Bennett had the unusual experience of having accompanied this family to Egypt and
Australia.
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When Mafeje entered Langa as a paid research assistant on 16 November
1960, having completed his second and final undergraduate year of social
anthropology at UCT, he still had ‘an aunt and an uncle who have been
in town since the early forties and all their children are with them’.43
He described them in his fieldnotes as ‘decent people’, a term that he
and Monica used to identify the town-based ‘respectable middle class’ in
their published book.44 His strongest networks were with this educated
middle class. When Monica asked him to present his own categories of
social groups, an issue she had already shown a keen interest in during
her much earlier fieldwork in East London (see Chapter 3) and rank them
in order of importance, he rated ‘education’ as the most important rank
and index of difference after ‘colour’. For each informant he carefully
recorded (at Monica’s request) the level of education of his interviewee
along with their age, sex and social group, and the date of interview.
His notes show that in the early weeks and months he worked mainly
with well-educated informants, many of whom he knew from Healdtown
Missionary College, Fort Hare University or UCT. Thus, for example,
it was an educational rather than a political connection that put him
in touch with Philip Kgosana, the young Pan African Congress (PAC)
member who later achieved fame for his leadership of the Langa March
of March 1960. In March 1959 Archie, then in his second year, took
Kgosana through the rituals of registration.
I had never been to Cape Town before. I had about two pounds from
friends. [When I first arrived] I went to a hotel at District Six. In that
little hotel I found a man who is now a professor today, Professor Archie
Mafeje . . . Archie took me to the campus. There were very, very few Africans on the campus. There were something like sixteen or so [Africans]
on the whole campus. We went through the routines [of registration] in
Jameson Hall, the whole procedure, what it means to start with university
studies and so on.45
The networks of school and politics overlapped in other cases, notably
with that of his best friend from school years Archie Nkonyeni, who was
doing B.Com. at UCT and lived in Langa. They met on weekends as
members of the Society for Young Africa, the youth and student branch of
the Non-European Unity Movement. Nkonyeni was the secretary. Many
of their meetings were held at the home of I. B. Tabata and Jane Gool
43
44
45
WC, K3, Interviews and Notes by Archie Mafeje, Folder 3, Field report, 67, 94, 192.
Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa, 26.
Philip Kgosana interviewed by Howard Phillips, Cape Town, 3 May 1994. Thanks to
Howard Phillips for making this interview available. The university records put the
number of African students at 18 in 1958.
‘Speaking from Inside’
265
Figure 8.3. Archie Mafeje (right) in Adderley Street, Cape Town with fellow
UCT student and anti-apartheid political activist Welsh Makanda, August 1961.
Three months later he began his fieldwork in Langa.46
Woodstock.47 There is little doubt that these political connections were
important in the volatile context in which he entered the field.48
His connections with Xhosa migrants from the Eastern Cape were
equally important. It is easy to forget, given the emphasis of the Langa
book on urban ‘associations’, that no fewer than 75 per cent of the
46
47
48
Margaret Green, private collection. Reproduced with permission from Margaret Green.
Telephonic interview with Archie Nkonyeni by Andrew Bank, 4 December 2008 (unless
otherwise stated, all interviews to the end of the chapter are by Andrew Bank). On
biographical writing about Tabata see Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and
History in South Africa’.
The politically volatility of the period of Archie’s fieldwork has been well documented
in the wider literature on the history of political protest against apartheid, beginning
with Tom Lodge’s meticulous reconstruction of the events of the Langa March of 1960
(Tom Lodge, ‘The Cape Town Troubles, March–April 1960’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 4, 2 (April 1978), 216–239) reproduced in much the same form in Tom Lodge,
Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), Chapter 9;
on the radicalism and anti-white discourse in PAC speeches of the time, see Gail M.
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
CA and London: UCLA Press, 1978), Chapter 7.
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population of Langa were Xhosa-speaking migrant labourers from the
Eastern Cape – like Mafeje himself. One of the six extended case studies
of ‘home-boys’ living in the hostels, recorded in his fieldnotes and reproduced almost verbatim in the published text, features migrants from
Engcobo whom he had known from his teenage years. Archie’s fellow
student and housemate from 1958 through to 1960, the late Fikile Bam,
recalled that (after moving together from a house in Crawford to one in
District Six) they used to visit these ‘Engcobo boys’ in Langa in order to
collect sticks, sjamboks and blankets so that they could disguise themselves when walking in the streets of District Six at night. ‘Instead of
attacking us, the [District Six] “skollies” would greet us with shouts
of “Hello, Engcobo boys.”’49 Bam confirmed that they had established
social networks in Langa as early as 1958. ‘We were visiting Langa for all
sorts of things. I would tend to go and watch football. He was interested
in rugby, because Fort Hare was a rugby place.’ A taxi driver named Mac
Mayekiso was Archie’s man on the inside.
He [Mac] acted as a kind of conductor. This was one of the things he
was doing in Langa and Nyanga. He knew about shebeens and concerts.
Archie would test his theories about Langa on Mac. He would come home
and say to me, ‘You know Mac is wise now, because he spends time with
Archie.’50
‘Archie is wise’ was Mafeje’s motto, according to Margaret Green, one
of his close friends at UCT.51 Another fellow student, Deirdre Levinson, recalls Mafeje sitting in the front row of the lecture halls with an
‘admiring white girl on either side’.52 Whether or not this was a factor
in his success at eliciting interviews from female informants in Langa,
his notes reveal a great sense of openness and ease in his discussion with
female interviewees, those colourfully described in the text of the book
as amagodukakazi, ootstotsikazi, itopikazi, uMackazi and women of the
middle-class ooscuse-me group.53 This is in stark contrast with the bluff
former cadet Robin Crosse-Upcott, who was unable to record a single
interview with a female informant, something he attributed to taboos
about sex and the colour bar.54 Women feature in his fieldnotes only as a
presence on the margins, either making or (more frequently) not making
him tea when he was visiting their husbands.
49
50
51
52
53
54
Telephonic interview with Fikile Bam, 9 July 2010. For a more general account of Bam’s
early years at UCT, see K. S. Broun, Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South
African Law (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), 65–66.
Telephonic interview with Fikile Bam, 9 July 2010.
Interview with Margaret Green, Plumstead, Cape Town, 21 June 2010.
Deirdre Levinson, ‘Speaking of Archie’ in Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh, eds, CODESRIA
Bulletin: Special Issue, 54–55.
See Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa, Chapters 2 and 4.
WC, K2.4, Other Interviews, Interview by Crosse-Upcott with Mr Mshumpela.
‘Speaking from Inside’
267
Mafeje also had a good knowledge of township life in Johannesburg,
a by-product of his female friendship circles there. In 1957 he reestablished romantic ties with his girlfriend from Healdtown, Nomfundo
Noruwana, now a nurse-in-training at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg. He would visit her during university vacations, usually travelling
up by train with Fikile Bam, whose eldest sister was a matron at Baragwanath. One of us (Vuyiswa Swana) was training there as a nurse at the
time and her elder brother made a point of introducing her to the Johannesburg theatre and Wits University campus during his vacation visits.
Archie Mafeje married Nomfundo Noruwana in Kwazakhele township
in Port Elizabeth in 1961 and their son Xolani was born in April 1962.55
His wider knowledge of township life had a significant bearing on the
Langa book, which makes numerous comparative observations about
the styles of township youth. As he explained in one of his first letters
to Monica, ‘I am finding quite a number of interesting points about
Johannesburg in connection with the work I have been doing, so that
even if my business [visiting his girlfriend] is finished, I might hang on
here as long as that won’t inconvenience you.’56
Re-Reading the Langa Field Report of Archie Mafeje,
16 November 1960 to March 1962
The complexities of the authorship are most apparent when analysing
Mafeje’s Langa field report. In the archive we encounter his report
divided across seven folders, which was the way Monica used his material in writing up the seven main chapters of their book. The first of
the numbered pages dates to 16 November 1960 (rather than November 1961, as Monica mistakenly claimed). While his records in the first
month may be read as fieldnotes in the sense of writings recorded on
site while conducting interviews, most of the pages that follow are better
described as a field report, written in the more detached mode of the
overview constructed in retrospect.57 In Clifford’s terms, this is ‘description’ rather than ‘inscription’ or ‘transcription’.58 We have no record of
jottings or rougher notes that might have preceded the report, if indeed
he produced such notes.
By now Monica had accepted full responsibility for writing the final
report. She had spent some of her research leave between January and
55
56
57
58
Telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, 15 June 2010.
WC, K1.2, Correspondence with Archie Mafeje re research, 1960–1961, Archie
Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 26 Jan. 1961, Cape Town. For references to Johannesburg
townships that derive in part from Mafeje’s personal knowledge, see Wilson and Mafeje,
Langa, 21–22, 26, 33–34, 74, 79, 145–146, 170, 174.
WC, K3, Interviews and Notes by Archie Mafeje, 7 folders especially Folders 1–3.
James Clifford, ‘Notes on (Field)notes’, 47–70.
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June 1959 wading through Crosse-Upcott’s fieldnotes and drafted a
rough paper entitled ‘Some Features of African Urbanization in the
Western Cape’, which was limited to a discussion of Churches and clubs,
the two topics on which Crosse-Upcott had collected data.59 She now
began to develop an interest, not evident in the planning phases of the
project, in how the people of Langa categorised themselves and one
another. This would be one of the most interesting chapters in the book
(Chapter 2: Categories of People). Monica provided Mafeje with a list
headed ‘Criteria of identification’.
How do you identify people? A. Yourself. B. 10 friends, 5 men, 5 women. C.
Older men and women. D. Educated and uneducated differences? E. Town
and country differences (i.e. by townsmen and countrymen) F. Situational
differences? e.g. Street in Langa. Bus. UCT. Dance. Church.60
Mafeje’s fieldnotes begin as a reply to these instructions, recording his
own way of categorising people and then those of ten of his friends
in Langa. He divided the township’s population into the three primary
groups that are set out in the book’s second chapter: ‘I Uneducated
migrant labourers; II Self-educated and semi-urbanised; III Completely
urbanized.’ The ‘completely urbanized’ were subdivided into the ‘tsotsitype’ and the ‘respectable and educated group’ with which he clearly
associated himself.61 He went into detail about the defining features of
each of these social groups. What is most striking is the sense of immediacy about these observations. They colourfully capture the texture of
styles and identities on the street. For some reviewers of the Langa book,
this was one of the study’s main achievements.62
These are not syntheses of information from questionnaires, but observations of people’s expressions of identity in everyday life. He reported
in detail on dress and style, as one might expect from someone who took
great interest in his personal appearance.63 He reported on how people
walked and talked. In the case of the semi-urbanised Xhosa, for example,
he commented on their ‘distinct exhibitionism’. They are ‘inclined to
speak English often in public places e.g. in the street, buses and in any
59
60
61
62
63
WC, K1.1, Correspondence re: Research into African Communities in the Western
Cape, 1950–1962, Monica Wilson/National Council of Scientific Research, 10 September 1959. The letter accompanied a draft progress report. There is, unfortunately, no
copy of this first draft in WC.
WC, K4, Notes Made by Monica Wilson, ‘Correspondence and Questions about Langa
Research’. Her next list of questions was on ‘Home boys’ followed by a series on
‘Kinship’. The book chapters followed these themes.
WC, K3, Folder 1, 1.
See Aidan Southall, ‘Review of Langa’, The American Journal of Sociology, 70, 4 (Jan.
1965), 510–11. Southall’s incisive review is one of the few commentaries that (in our
view) captures the true spirit of the book.
Discussion with Vuyiswa Swana, 29 May 2010; telephonic interview with Nomfundo
Mafeje, 6 June 2010.
‘Speaking from Inside’
269
other big gathering; style of dress flashy and gorgeous . . . Their Xhosa
[is] very much influenced by English, Afrikaans and other slang words.’64
In describing himself in his fieldnotes, Archie devoted a full paragraph
to his ability to pick up a sense of dialect from the spoken word. ‘I can
readily classify people according to their accent e.g. I can tell whether one
was Xhosa speaking, Sotho, Zulu, Rhodesian, Portuguese East African,
South West African even if one was speaking English to me.’ He claimed
to be able to distinguish easily ‘Pondos from Bhacas, Bhacas from Hlubis,
Transkeians from Ciskeians’ on the basis of the different Xhosa dialects.65
His field report bears this out.
His sense of insider identity went beyond his knowledge of language
and dialect. In a lengthy unpublished critique of Philip Mayer’s Townsmen or Tribesmen written during the course of his fieldwork,66 Mafeje
made explicit mention of his status as an insider with deeper background
knowledge of ‘African’ beliefs.67 He noted in response to one of the
entries on Mayer’s questionnaire: ‘Do you believe in the ancestor-cult or
Christianity?’
The question . . . is altogether unsuited to give the field-worker even the
vaguest clue to the problem. Speaking from the inside, I want to state
categorically that most of the Africans, if not all, who still do believe in
the existence of benevolent supreme beings . . . do [also] believe, whether
vaguely or strongly, in ancestral spirits [our emphasis].68
His uncertainty (see the deletion in his note above) over whether to write
‘speaking from the inside’ or ‘speaking from inside’ is interesting. It seems
to suggests a sense of dual identity as insider: both as cultural insider who
could speak ‘from inside’ and as insider in the spatial or physical sense
of speaking from ‘the inside’ of a place like Langa.
In his early days in the field, Mafeje followed Wilson’s instructions,
interviewing ‘10 friends, 5 men, 5 women’. He chose his peers. All these
interviewees were between the ages of 18 and 30, and in the case of his
male informants relatively well educated. In writing up the case studies,
and those of the older men and women he interviewed in late November
of 1960, he incorporated extensive verbatim testimony in Xhosa which he
64
65
66
67
68
WC, K3, Folder 1, 1.
Ibid., 3.
At one point in the commentary he makes reference to his field reports, again though in
the spirit of dialogue which characterised their work: ‘Please check this point [his case
for a correlation between specific types of migrant employment and respective lengths
of work record] on the case histories I handed in’ (WC, J13.3, Papers and Articles by
Archie Mafeje, A. Mafeje, ‘General Remarks: Townsmen or Tribesmen – P. Mayer’,
45).
He was in fact a Thembu.
WC, J13.3, Papers and Articles by Archie Mafeje, A. Mafeje, ‘General Remarks: Townsmen or Tribesmen – P. Mayer’, 51.
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usually translated for Monica’s benefit even though she had a good knowledge of Xhosa. This suggests that he felt some of the nuances needed
to be explained by the insider ethnographer. He also flaunted his newly
acquired anthropological vocabulary with liberal sprinklings of technical
terms, from ‘functional group’ to ‘sexual taboo’ or ‘clan exogamy’.69
They met in her UCT office fortnightly to discuss his latest findings.
When Monica was in Hogsback during vacations, they corresponded by
letter. The letters he wrote during his early weeks and months in the field
bubble over with a sense of enthusiasm and his passion for fieldwork.
After his first few weeks he wrote that ‘I simply love Social Anthropology
and I have no doubt that it is the sort of study I would like to do for
a whole life-time.’ He later claimed: ‘During the first week I started
working in Langa I don’t remember any day on which I left Langa before
12 midnight.’ Monica was delighted with the quality of his field data.
In January 1961 he wrote to her that ‘it was really a pleasure collecting
that material . . . I gained the invaluable experience of going to the field
myself and seeing what is there. I really learnt in this short space of time
much more than books could ever have taught me. It was very kind of
you, thanks so much for everything.’70
These letters reveal that their relationship was always warm, but during
the course of the project became close. In recollecting their relationship
with Monica during the 1960s and early 1970s, her white former students (or junior colleagues) tend to remember her with great respect, but
always with a sense of formality and distance.71 With Mafeje things were
different. I attribute that partly to his outgoing personality and confidence, but largely to the Langa project itself and their shared engagement
in knowledge production. In his letters he would usually ask about her
health and sometimes asked if she was feeling lonely at Hogsback with
the Christmas crowd gone. It is difficult to imagine any of her white
students breezily signing off, ‘With fondest regards, Goodbye, Yours sincerely, Archie.’72 He also wrote openly at one point regarding his anxiety
about how she viewed him and his work, reflecting that he was unsure
whether it was appropriate to address one’s professor in such a direct
and personal way. Monica, on her side, developed great respect for him
as a person, reporting in references that she had great trust in him and
commenting on his bravery at the time of his arrest and imprisonment in
69
70
71
72
WC, K3, Folder 3, Field report, 67, 94, 192.
WC, K1.2 Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 28 Nov. 1960, Cape Town; ibid., Archie
Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 22 July 1961, Eastern Pondoland; ibid., Archie Mafeje/Monica
Wilson, 15 Jan. 1961, Cape Town.
See especially Heike Becker and Emile Boonzaier, eds, ‘“Remembering Monica”: Monica Wilson’s Students Appreciate Their Teacher’ in Anthropology Southern Africa Programme and Abstract Book (Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 2008), 75–87.
See also Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’, 33; and Chapter 10 in this volume.
WC, K1.2, Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 20 Jan. 1962, Cape Town.
‘Speaking from Inside’
271
August 1963. She visited him in prison at Roeland Street and assisted in
organising a lawyer for his defence. He also established close friendships
with her sons Francis and Tim, and was a regular visitor at their house in
Rondebosch.73 From 1966 onwards, as a doctoral student in Cambridge,
he began to address Monica as ‘Aunt Monica’ and referred to himself at
one point as ‘one of your neglected sons’.74 In a later letter to Monica,
his father Bennett commented, ‘You take Archie as one of your sons.’75
This sense of warmth, even kinship, was at the very heart of the creative
relationship that produced Langa.
During the six to eight months that followed, Mafeje addressed detailed
sets of questions that Monica set for him under the subheadings that
would form the chapters of their book. His field report runs to nearly
530 pages – at around 75 words a page, some 40,000 words in length.
While the significance of Archie’s information on ‘home-boys’ and the
‘arbitration of disputes’ has been recognised,76 and to some degree the
material that he collected on ‘categories of people’,77 the importance of
his ethnography of an emerging urban culture of leisure in the township has yet to be appreciated.78 The subsections on ‘Sports Clubs’ and
‘Music and Dance Clubs’ in the Langa book are drawn almost exclusively
from Mafeje’s lively field report based on his participant observation of
many concerts and his close contacts with band members and sportsmen. These contrast sharply with Crosse-Upcott’s dry summaries of the
minutes of club meetings.79
In collecting this material Archie went well beyond Monica’s brief.
He had long been passionately interested in township music. In his high
school years he would bring gramophone records back home during
summer vacations and order his younger siblings to clear the furniture
from their lounge so that he could orchestrate a performance of the tango
or the jive on this makeshift stage. The lack of a family radio in these
years made the sound of these records all the more magical.80
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
Ibid., Monica Wilson reference, 2 Aug. 1965, Cape Town.
Ibid., Archie Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 5 June 1967, Cambridge.
WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence with Archie Mafeje, 1960–1979 (includes some corr.
with family members), Bennett Mafeje/Monica Wilson, 23 Feb. 1971, Ugie, Eastern
Cape.
See, for example, Powdermaker, ‘Review of Langa’, 1199; Sharp, ‘Mafeje and Langa’,
31.
See especially Southall, ‘Review of Langa’, 510–11.
For a later revisionist history of popular culture in Langa, see Rashidi M. Molapo,
‘Sports, Festivals and Popular Politics: Aspects of the Social and Popular Culture
in Langa Township, 1945–1970’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town,
1994).
He did also collect material on music in two interviews with Mr Matshiqi, chair of the
Western Province Musicians’ Association. (WC, K2.3 Crosse-Upcott: Interviews with
Clubs, Interviews with Mr Matshiqi, 30 Sept. 1955 and 25 Oct. 1955).
During his decades in exile he would regularly urge family members to send him ‘good
township music’. He was also passionate about classical music, as one of his UCT
friends and tutorial students recalls. Rene Hirschon, ‘Archie Mafeje’, Mafeje Panel
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Monica did not make enough of Archie’s ethnography of township
music. Consider, for example, the passionate tone in this description of
the music played by the Cordettes and the Disciples, two of the young
bands whose music he knew well and whose members were close friends.
They are really jazz and kwela maniacs. They blow until every teenager
‘rocks’ his head off. They are the favourites of the ikhaba [one of Langa’s
social groups]. They are referred to as ‘intwana zihot maan’ – really hot
youngsters.’81
Of Langa’s most solidly established band, the Merry Macs, Mafeje reported that ‘the quality of their music is relatively good and they cover quite
a range in music. They have some ball-room, jazz, calypso and samba
numbers.’ He quoted from his interviews with these older musicians. ‘No
these small boys are tiring. They play hot numbers throughout the night
and that makes one completely exhausted the following day.’82 Monica’s
account of the ‘musical and dance clubs’ only conveys in muted terms
the energetic sections of Mafeje’s field report on what retrospectively has
been termed ‘the Cape jazz boom’83 or the ‘golden age of Cape jazz’ in
these years before many of the leading musicians were forced into exile.84
Sport was another aspect of cultural life in Langa that is more fully
dealt with in Mafeje’s report than in the published text. Here too there is
a case to be made for the influence of personal background and interests
on cultural knowledge production in the field. Mafeje had played rugby
at school. Nkonyeni recalls that his friend was the first team hooker at
Nqabara. Ganief Hendricks remembers their guest playing football in the
street outside their house.85 His field report gives detailed accounts of his
participant observation on the sidelines at football and rugby matches,
and suggests a close knowledge of these sports as well as of the township teams who played them. Again there is an argument to be made for
Monica having not made enough of this insider ethnography of the culture of leisure in Langa. His 50 pages on football clubs, for example,
were pared down to just five in the final text.86
81
82
83
84
85
86
Discussion, Anthropology Southern Africa Conference, East London, 10 Sept. 2010
(Baluku, Video).
WC, K3, Folder 3, Field report, 382.
Ibid., 380–381.
For an evocative account based on 20 interviews with the jazz old-timers, see C. Miller,
‘“Julle Kan Ma New York Toe Gaan, Ek Bly in die Manenberg”: An Oral History of Jazz
in Cape Town from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s’ in S. Field, R. Meyer and F.
Swanson, eds, Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town (Cape Town:
Human Sciences Research Council, 2007), 133–149.
Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 126–130. Miller qualifies this view by making a
persuasive case for the vibrancy of the underground jazz scene of the mid-late 1960s
and 1970s in Cape Town. See Miller, ‘Julle Kan Ma New York Toe Gaan’.
Interview with Ganief Hendricks, 12 June 2010, Cape Town.
WC, K3, Folder 3, Field report, 301–50; Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 120–125.
‘Speaking from Inside’
273
One last point about his insider ethnography relates to overheard
speech. Mafeje’s report is filled with a sense of dialogue and conversation.
This is conveyed in a series of ten vignettes of overheard conversations
presented in the book. Monica had identified the value of reporting on
overheard conversations in the list of ‘General Instructions’ about fieldwork she had issued at the outset. Other points related to the need for
informant confidentiality and the importance of collecting case studies.87
Mafeje’s success at collecting this kind of data relates to his insider status
in both the cultural and the spatial sense. He was a cultural insider who
could understand the nuances of conversations, selecting to record the
interactions that seemed to him revealing of particular township identities and cultural forms. He was also an insider in the spatial sense of being
a well-connected young man, mobile enough to move through various
public spaces from the bus to the street to the community hall.
The Writing of Langa: from Draft Manuscript to
Published Text
Monica’s main contribution was drawing together, under enormous pressure, the fieldwork and other materials that made up the Langa book.
Her letters speak of an internationally recognised scholar overburdened
by professional responsibilities at UCT. In September 1959 she wrote
of having to put her work on the Langa project on hold again, as she
was now teaching six courses. These included Social Anthropology I
with 81 registered students (including Mafeje). The first-year intake had
increased to over a hundred by 1961 and remained at a high level through
the 1960s.88 There was a staffing crisis in the School of African Life and
Languages of which she was the head. The archaeologist A. J. H. Goodwin fell ill in July 1959 and died in December that year. Jack Simons was
detained from 25 April to 21 May 1960 under the new emergency regulations and was under increasing pressure from the security police, leading
eventually to his being forced into exile in 1964. Her co-leader on the
‘African communities in the Western Cape’ project, the economist Sheila
van der Horst, had a serious operation in March 1960. As a result her
study of African workers in Cape Town was published after rather than
before Langa as Monica had hoped.89 To top it all, she was constantly
being ‘harried’ by the National Council of Scientific Research (NCSR)
87
88
89
WC, K4, Monica Wilson, ‘General Instructions’, Nov. 1960.
WC, J1, Social Anthropology Department, Administration.
Sheila T. van der Horst, African Workers in Town: A Study of Labour in Cape Town
(Cape Town, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). They wanted
to follow the sequence of the ‘Xhosa in Town’ project led by Philip Mayer, where the
quantitative overview published by the sociologist Desmond Reader came out before
the more qualitative anthropological study.
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for her final report. She complained that ‘the University of Cambridge,
the International African Institute, and the Carnegie Corporation of New
York all left me to work at my own pace and trusted that the material
would be written up in due course, as it has been’.90
As we have seen, Monica and Mafeje had to start almost from scratch
when he began his fieldwork in November 1960. Crosse-Upcott’s material was only really of use for the analysis of Churches, which would make
up no more than ten pages of the 190-page published text.91 She was
able to produce a final report by June 1962 that Oxford University Press
thought worthy of publication. How was she able to do so?
The quality of Archie’s field materials was the decisive factor, of course.
Within a fortnight she had come to realise that Mafeje was ‘one of the
best fieldworkers I have ever struck, irrespective of colour’. After he had
been in the field for three months she wrote from the Hogsback with
enthusiasm. ‘Mafeje’s material is magnificent and I feel that the report
will now really be worth publishing, so I shall apply [to UCT] for a publication grant when I send in the complete report.’92 They met frequently
after her return to Cape Town. She kept records of these meetings which
confirm that the research process was an ongoing conversation between
them. Her lists of questions reveal a growing curiosity and knowledge on
her part of social and cultural life in Langa, about which she wanted ever
more information. The following list is typical.
Questions arising while writing up:
1. Is there rigid control by the administration of the numbers in a room
in the Barracks? Zones? Flats? Or do the groups occupying have some
latitude in deciding how many men can be packed in?
2. Are there women brewing beer for sale in Langa? If so what [social]
category do they fall into?
3. Can a widow or unmarried mother get or keep a house? Must houses
always be in a man’s name?
4. What do amatopikazi [older traditional women] do? Housewives only?
Some domestic servants?
5. At a guess what would you say are the proportion in Langa who are
amagoduka, ibari, ikhaba?
90
91
92
WC, K1.1, Correspondence re: Research into African Communities in the Western
Cape, 1950–1962, Monica Wilson/UCT Principal, 6 October 1959, Rondebosch, Cape
Town; Monica Wilson/W. H. Hutt, 2 June 1960, Rondebosch, Cape Town.
Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 91–102. Even here Archie gathered additional
material in the last phase of his research in January to March 1962, though it is clear
from his notes that he had little interest in Churches. His parents were staunch Methodists but his friends recall that he had already stopped going to church in his days at
Healdtown.
WC, K1.1, Monica Wilson/Mr Hibbard, 28 Nov. 1960, Rondebosch, Cape Town;
Monica Wilson/Sheila van der Horst, 3 Feb. 1961, Rondebosch, Cape Town.
‘Speaking from Inside’
275
Sometimes these questions related to nuances of speech and dialect, as
when she enquired whether ‘clicks are elided in town’.93
In order to speed up the writing process, she chose to follow the
broad template she had used in writing up the Keiskammahoek Rural
Survey (KRS), vol. 3: Social Structure. An introductory chapter provided
background history and commentary on method, the second tackled the
themes of social groups and organisational structures (KRS Chapter 2:
Village Organization; and Langa Chapters 2 and 3: Categories of People
and Home-Boys). Both books then feature chapters on kinship networks,
with marital relations as a significant theme (KRS Chapter 3: Kinship;
Langa Chapter 4: Kinsmen). The four subsections in KRS Chapter 5 (A.
Church, B. School, C. Recreational Associations and D. Gift Clubs) are
echoed in Langa Chapter 5 (Churches, Schools and Traditional Rites)
and Chapter 6 (Clubs). Even the final main chapter of Langa, ‘Chapter 8:
Arbitration of Disputes’, has its precedent in the last main one of the KRS
volume: ‘Chapter 6: Expression of Conflict’.94
Another strategy she used to speed up the writing of a book produced
under great pressure was to enlist the support of colleagues. In June 1962
she sent her NCRS final report to Audrey Richards, Desmond Hobart
Houghton, Jack Simons, A. C. Jordan, Dan Kunene and of course Archie
Mafeje. Richards described the report as ‘first rate’ but recommended
that Monica ‘consider the English reader a bit’, given that the book
would also be published outside South Africa. This might explain the
surprising number of comparative references to English urban history
at a time when African urban anthropology was a much more dynamic
field. She took up Richards’s suggestion that the introduction should
provide background for the general reader rather than for the specialist
and that the writing style be economical and accessible. In keeping with
this, Richards recommended that Monica cut back on vernacular terms
in the text.95
Mafeje’s typed comments are most relevant for the case we are making for reading Langa as an example of ‘the co-production of scientific
knowledge’ in team research work. The book expressed a shared vision, despite Mafeje’s later claims about his discomfort with some of
Monica’s assumptions. This is not surprising, seeing how strongly the
text drew on his own data, arguments and writing in the field report. He
93
94
95
WC, K4, Archie Mafeje, Monica Wilson’s record of meetings, n.d. [late 1961 or early
1962].
Monica Wilson, Selma Kaplan, Theresa Maki and Edith M. Walton, Keiskammahoek
Rural Survey, vol. 3: Social Structure (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1952).
WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson’s Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Audrey Richards/
Monica Wilson, 12 June 1962, Cambridge; ibid., Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 13
June 1962, Cambridge.
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Inside African Anthropology
made extensive comments on grammatical errors in the draft, which were
probably received in a light spirit since Monica encouraged him to study
English Special as an extra subject and had insisted that his written
English needed urgent work in his undergraduate years. Mafeje even
described the chapter on Churches as ‘beatifully [sic] written, and the
facts in it are amazingly accurate and well expressed’, a somewhat ironic
judgement in the light of his severe later critique of the Christian liberal underpinnings of the Langa study. He made some suggestions about
‘political facts’ that needed closer attention. Here Monica jotted ‘v.g’
[very good] point’ in the margins, but his general message was that he
enthusiastically endorsed the arguments of the draft manuscript.
Other than the few points I have raised, I am satisfied with the exposition
of facts in this work. I am also in full agreement with the more fundamental
ideas expressed i.e. at no time did I find myself forced to compromise my
ideas. I am particularly pleased about this because I look at this study as a
purely scientific work which has nothing to do with what the white or black
nationalist feels. It grieves me to think that under the present [political]
conditions, there are certain truths which cannot be stated.96
John Sharp has asked why, given Mafeje’s Non-European Unity Movement background and affiliation, he was not more critical of the underlying liberal framework of Langa. Sharp suggests that it was only after he
had matured as an intellectual that his politics and his scholarship came
into alignment, in particular in his later critical essays about the discipline of social anthropology. Our own view is that the politics of his knowledge was rather more complex and ambiguous than scholars, including
Mafeje himself, have tended to suggest in their retrospective readings.
Although he was an active member of the Society for Young Africa who,
according to Fikile Bam, was known for his ability to quote Lenin chapter
and verse, he had also gone to mission schools and imbibed certain of
these values, as the memories of friends like Archie Nkonyeni indicate. In
fact, Nkonyeni explicitly claims that in his Langa study years Mafeje was
‘not the radical he would later become’. He also recalls a certain distrust
of his friend among some of the members of the Society for Young Africa,
who saw Mafeje as too closely allied with liberals like Monica Wilson.97
On the other hand, white women friends at UCT clearly recall him as an
outspoken critic of liberal ideology from his early years on campus.98
Whatever the exact nature of his political views at the time of his
96
97
98
WC, K1.4, Comments on TSS [Archie Mafeje], ‘Comments on the Manuscript’, n.d.
[c. May 1962].
Telephonic interview with Archie Nkonyeni, 4 December 2008.
Interview with Margaret Green, Cape Town, 21 June 2010; Hirschon, ‘Archie Mafeje’.
Hirschon was tutored by Archie Mafeje in social anthropology in 1962 and attributes
her later career path as a social anthropologist in large part to his inspiring classes at
UCT.
‘Speaking from Inside’
277
fieldwork, his writings about Langa suggest that he was more sympathetic
then to the educated elite than to the more radical proletarian youth with
whom he later claimed to have identified most closely.99 The contrast in
the book between the ‘decent’ middle class and the ‘rough’ and ‘violent’
urban youth directly echoes Mafeje’s field report.
Monica posted the reworked text of Langa to the NCRS and to Oxford
University Press.100 The book’s Acknowledgements were added in March
1963. Three months later Audrey Richards reported excitedly that she
had a copy on her desk.
Conclusion: Authorship and Insider Ethnography
Who authored Langa: A Study in Social Groups? We have argued for
moving away from thinking about the book’s production in exclusive
terms as the work of Monica Wilson, as contemporary reviewers liked
to see it, or of Archie Mafeje, as some recent posthumous reappraisals
have suggested. While the project had a long and rather troubled history,
going back to Jack Simons’s work in Langa in 1937 or at least to Monica’s
grant proposals of 1953–4, the book was really the product of an intense
period of creative engagement between Monica and Archie over twenty
months between November 1960 and June 1962.
Our case for co-production has been based in large part on a close
rereading of Mafeje’s fieldwork report. Mafeje wrote the report by hand
during his months of fieldwork in Langa, the questions he sought to
answer being often very specific ones set by Monica. He did sometimes
go beyond her brief, especially in documenting the culture of leisure in
Langa. His writing was the product of his training as a social anthropology undergraduate in 1959 and 1960, and her guiding instructions in
meetings, but also obviously drew on his own astute observations and
interviews with men and women in Langa. Monica did draw together the
materials under enormous pressure, but to suggest that she ‘wrote’ the
book on the basis of his fieldwork and other materials would also be too
simplistic, given the extent of her reliance on his very words in the field
report. We see particularly close connections between field report and
published text in the book chapters on categories of people, home-boys,
clubs and arbitration in disputes. Monica did contextualise, synthesise,
edit and simplify to make their ideas accessible to the general reader as
well as the specialist. Here we saw how Volume 3 of the Keiskammahoek
Rural Survey served as a template.
The personal relationship between Monica and Mafeje was essential
to this process of ‘co-production’. We have noted that Mafeje had a way
99
100
Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’, 178–184.
WC, K1.1, Monica Wilson/UCT Accountant, 27 June 1962.
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Inside African Anthropology
of relating to Wilson that was unusual among his fellow students, one
that was open and direct from the outset. There was always a sense of
respect and reciprocity: the sense on her side of a willingness to listen and
learn from a student and on his of a respect for a female professor who
was industrious, productive and curious about his cultural background
and politically committed to the democratic struggle in South Africa.
Despite their differences in political affiliation, they were able to connect
at a more general level. We also need to be cautious about projecting
too confident and assertive an intellectual identity for Archie Mafeje
back into these early years. While he developed very quickly both as a
writer and fieldworker, his early correspondence with Monica suggests
a deep underlying anxiety and need for affirmation, and he came to
anthropology as a struggling student. This was not yet a relationship
between intellectual equals, although by the late 1960s it was becoming
one as they sent each other articles and book chapters for critique and
commentary.
The other central theme has been our analysis of Archie as insider
ethnographer with a case for the importance of personal interests and
background in shaping his ethnographic ‘style’. Here we found it useful to contrast the fieldwork styles and networks of Archie and CrosseUpcott, who had little formal training as an anthropologist and brought
a military and colonial mentality to Langa as a field-site. Above all, he
spoke no Xhosa and thus never got ‘inside’ the place in either the social
or spatial sense, despite recording about a hundred visits to Langa. His
only effective intermediary was a man widely seen as a collaborator, Mr
Matshiqi, which only added to the already deep-seated suspicions of
residents about the white outsider and his underlying political motives.
Mafeje was an insider in a cultural sense, but also socially and spatially through his established networks that allowed for mobility inside
the township. We have argued that these networks predated his formal
employment as a fieldworker on the Langa project, dating back to his
early years when he lived in Athlone with Fikile Bam. The taxi driver Mac
Mayekiso was an important intermediary. He also had a long-standing
and ongoing family link with Langa, but here it is important to note
his dual identities as a young migrant born in a remote ‘Red’ village
of Thembuland who all the same had acquired a ‘School’ identity during his years at Nqabara, Healdtown and then at Fort Hare and UCT.
This close knowledge of both Red and School allowed for an unusually
clear reconstruction of the social lives of both the middle-class elite and
the working-class migrants in Langa. In most cases he usually began by
working through his friends. His strength as a fieldworker was arguably
this ability to straddle the ideologies of different social groups.
It is this sense of insider knowledge, evident in the details within
chapters and case studies rather than in the articulation of any general
‘Speaking from Inside’
279
theory, that is the book’s greatest strength. Langa is not a classic work
of urban anthropology like the Mayers’ Townsmen or Tribesman with its
more in-depth ethnography of Red values and rituals, and its clearer theoretical contribution within the emerging field of African urban anthropology. Given its peculiar history, the Langa project could scarcely have
been a work with the same kind of ethnographic depth. Yet it is still a
highly significant and often undervalued contribution to urban studies in
South Africa. In the end it was quite remarkable that Archie Mafeje and
Monica Wilson were able to create an internationally respectable publication under conditions of severe political constraint. It was a work that
did successfully convey a sense of Langa’s ‘intense vitality’ – and in the
book’s concluding words, demonstrated that ‘something new is growing
in towns’.101
101
Monica Wilson and Mafeje, Langa, 189.
Part 4
Legacy
Figure P.4. Traces in the landscape: the trading store in Ntibane, Western Pondoland, then and now. This store owned by Frederick and Mary Dreyer (née Soga)
was where Monica Hunter effectively began her career as a fieldworker. As we
have seen, she recalled that she began her Pondoland fieldwork by engaging in
conversations in and around the shop with Pondo women, like those shown in
the foreground. She lived in a cottage behind the shop which also still stands
today. Along with the ruins of the Wilsons’ ‘principal headquarters’ at Isumba in
the Rungwe District (see Figure 4.4), these are the only remaining traces of her
presence in the landscapes of Pondoland and Bunyakyusa. Her legacy is rather
associated with her writings and her teaching.
Photographers: Monica Hunter, 1931 WC, uncat., from negative in a brown
cardboard box containing the Wilsons’ fieldwork photographs and Rui Assubuji,
June 2007.
9
‘Part of One Whole’: Anthropology and
History in the Work of Monica Wilson
Seán Morrow and Christopher Saunders
Though Monica Hunter Wilson is rightly remembered as a leading
anthropologist, her academic work was deeply concerned with change
over time. This perspective does not emerge from, say, the festschrift
published in her honour.1 She saw anthropology as a way of approaching and uncovering the history of African societies. In this orientation,
apparent early in her career, she was unlike any other major contemporary anthropologist of the British school. In developing a sense that
African societies had a history that could be written, she was in the forefront of developments for her time, particularly in South Africa, where
she worked. She was ahead of most scholars in pointing South African
historians towards the importance of the history of the majority of the
population. We will show, using in particular her still mostly unsorted
papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Department at the University
of Cape Town (UCT), that, though she remained professionally first
and foremost an anthropologist, it would be incorrect to see her as one
who now and then dabbled in history. She saw herself above all as an
anthropologist concerned with ‘how it becomes – that is with an analysis
of process’ over time.2
From a historiographical perspective Monica has been associated
above all with her joint editorship of, and contributions to, the Oxford
History of South Africa. The standard narrative is that this was the culmination of the work of a school of liberal historians, superseded almost as
soon as published by the work of a new generation of Marxist or Marxistinfluenced scholars. This ignores the long-standing historical dimension
to Monica’s work; underplays her role in moving anthropology in a
historical direction; and neglects the interdisciplinary and comparative
nature of her work. She kept abreast of the latest archaeological findings,
1
2
Michael Whisson and Martin West, eds, Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa.
Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975).
Monica Wilson, ‘Changes in Social Structure in Southern Africa: The Relevance of
Kinship Studies to the Historian’ in Leonard Thompson, ed., African Societies in Southern
Africa (London: Longman, 1969), 71.
283
284
Inside African Anthropology
followed contemporary British, French and other social history, and read
widely in fiction and poetry. As she wrote to her ex-student Archie Mafeje,
recently appointed head of sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam,
‘an interdisciplinary approach is very difficult, but it is obvious that rigid
divisions in subjects are as stultifying as group areas. I think my colleagues here get pretty cross at the way I stray into what they regard
as their preserves (history, “sociology” etc.) but that cannot be helped.
Students say that they are not taught, in other departments, to connect
the different disciplines. How can one learn without doing that?’3
Monica and History
Monica grew up with a strong sense of the history of the Eastern Cape.
Among her fellow pupils at Lovedale was Janet Maqoma, a descendant
of Chief Maqoma, who had defied British colonial conquest.4 She knew
her father had travelled in Pondoland, where she was to do her research
in the 1930s, before its annexation in 1894.5 Her early anthropological
work was not, as was so much ethnography of the time, the work of a
metropolitan intellectual observing the exotic ‘other’, for she researched
the lives of people similar to those with whom she had been at school at
Lovedale, with whom she had prayed, and who had been her neighbours
at Hogsback.
As an undergraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, she studied history before changing to anthropology. In notes in the last year of her life
for a chapter solicited by George Stocking for a book on anthropological
fieldwork, she referred to the inspiration of a ‘superb teacher’, the historian Mary Gwladys Jones.6 Jones, she said, had encouraged her always to
think about change, and to relate the history of open fields and enclosures
in England to the Ciskei, and of labour tenants on South African farms to
medieval English villeins.7 But when she looked at the history syllabus for
the senior years, she realised that she ‘would get nothing on the African
side and it seemed clear that I must read Social Anthropology’.8 She
3
4
5
6
7
8
WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Archie Mafeje, 25 March 1970, Rondebosch, Cape
Town. Thanks to Andrew Bank for drawing our attention to this reference.
WC, Monica Wilson interview: ‘childhood’. See Timothy J. Stapleton, Maqoma: Xhosa
Resistance to Colonial Advance, 1798–1873 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1994).
WC, uncat. corr., Notes for ‘Reflections on Fieldwork’, solicited by George Stocking
for History of Anthropology 1: Fieldwork in Historical Perspective, but not completed, n.d.
but clearly the outline of the piece referred to ibid., George W. Stocking/Monica Wilson,
15 March 1982, Chicago, and in Monica’s positive reply to Stocking on 6 April 1982,
Hogsback.
See Chapter 1 in this volume.
For Jones see references in Maxine Berg’s biography of Eileen Power, A Woman in History:
Eileen Power 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
WC, Monica Wilson interview: ‘Pondoland’.
‘Part of One Whole’
285
later recalled that the Cambridge anthropologists Alfred Haddon and
Jack Driberg had been ‘light weight’. It was only when she did fieldwork
in Pondoland that she came to know the importance of ‘observation’
and understood that it was always set within ‘preconceived categories
of thought’. This stayed with her, becoming more fully realised when
she worked in Bunyakyusa.9 Far from being converted from history to
anthropology, she came to believe that the anthropological approach was
the only possible way of attempting to write the history of African societies. It was only two decades later that new developments in African
historiography were to show that African societies could be treated in
the same ways as others, through using a variety of techniques including
archival research and the analysis of oral testimony and tradition.
In 1944–5 she told her students at the South African Native College
at Fort Hare that the anthropology they were studying with her was
comparable to the English history she had studied at Cambridge as an
undergraduate.10 She was critical of mainstream historians of her day –
she mentioned G. M. Trevelyan of Cambridge, who described his English Social History as ‘history with the politics left out’, and the French
historian Charles Seignobos – for failing to treat change over time, the
stuff of history as she saw it, sufficiently seriously. Instead, they treated
history as a chronicle, meant to be ‘more or less entertaining’. ‘They do
in fact make connections,’ she told her Fort Hare students, ‘but they
expressly deny the possibility of systematic and certain connections. To
accept that position is to abandon the possibility of understanding how
society works.’11
In the context of South African historiography W. M. Macmillan was
a pioneer in breaking with the work of George McCall Theal and George
Cory, but was dismissive of what he took to be the static and conservative
vision of contemporary anthropologists, by implication the would-be
preservers of outdated customs. Macmillan did not know any African
language and his histories were heavily based on the missionary archive.
He did not analyse the nature or histories of African societies, and part of
his animus against anthropologists may have stemmed from the fact that
some of them at least did attempt to do this. In notes Monica made on
his Cape Colour Question she wrote that he was good on events affecting
indigenous people, but that there was ‘[n]othing on [the] structure of
9
10
11
WC, uncat. corr., Notes for ‘Reflections on Fieldwork’, see n. 5 above. However, in
these scribbled notes, especially as she refers in them to the ‘influence of Haddon’, she
probably meant her supervisor T. C. Hodson rather than the eminent Haddon, who in
any case retired from Cambridge before Monica arrived.
WC, J5, Monica Wilson Lecture Notes, including, as here, some from Fort Hare, dated
1945.
WC, Occasional Papers, Social Change (uncat.), notes for lecture on ‘Social Change’,
n.d. [but Fort Hare period].
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Hottentot communities’.12 While she was critical of those who, unlike the
best French historians, neglected changing social structure and merely
provided ‘a succession of events’,13 she remained aware of the difference
between her approach and that of historians she respected: she told one
of them that she weighed the importance of the archive ‘rather differently’
and she contrasted the ‘approach of the historian accustomed to dealing
with records which are accessible and the anthropologist used to having
only his [sic] own record of events and correspondence as his source’.14
In the 1930s she thought that anthropology was the only way in which
African societies could be understood, and she came close to saying
that such understanding was a type of history. In her Pondoland work
she tried to explore the available documentary sources, but found them
deeply frustrating. The Cape Blue Books she consulted on the annexation
of Pondoland contained all too little history, and what there was she
found tendentious: ‘Of course Blue Books and Theal are suspect. Neither
mention that Rhodes took along a canon [sic] and mowed down a mealy
[sic] field to encourage the Pondo in their desire to be annexed!’15 Though
the bulk of Reaction to Conquest, her great work, was cast in the synchronic
functionalist mould then fashionable, where appropriate sources were
available, she adopted a historical approach, as in parts of the innovative
chapter on ‘Bantu on European farms’.16 Much later she was to note that,
though ‘it does seem old fashioned, nowadays’, historians and others
who had previously thought of the book as irrelevant to their interests no
longer did so: ‘The early anthropologists provide a sort of quarry, like
early travellers.’17
Monica was not a member of the broadly functionalist group in Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous seminars at the London School of Economics
12
13
14
15
16
17
WC, uncat. material, Lectures, Third Theological Staff Institute, 1965, Notes and
Drafts, handwritten notes on Macmillan’s Cape Colour Question; note also, ‘Some knowledge of an African (Bantu) language is a necessary tool for a historian studying “Native
Policy” in South Africa’ (WC, uncat. corr., Schreuder, Monica Wilson/Dr Christian
Pouyez, 3 April 1973, Rondebosch, Cape Town). For a different emphasis on Macmillan and anthropology see Hugh Macmillan, ‘“Paralysed conservatives”: W. M. Macmillan, the Social Scientists, and “the Common Society”, 1923–48’ in Hugh Macmillan
and Shula Marks, eds, Africa and Empire: W. M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic
(Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1989), 72–90.
WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Martin West, 17 Nov. 1980, Hogsback.
Ibid., De Kiewiet, Monica Wilson/De Kiewiet, 26 Nov. 1973, n.p.; ibid., Thompson,
Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 26 Nov. 1973, n.p.
WC, B1, Monica Hunter/Godfrey Wilson, 22 Feb. [1934], Union Castle ship, Cape
Town.
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo
of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press for International African Institute,
1936), esp. pp. 544–574.
WC, uncat. corr., David Philip, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 31 Dec. 1978, Hogsback;
ibid., Monica Wilson/J. E. Duncan (Juta & Co.), 17 Feb. 1979, n.p.
‘Part of One Whole’
287
in the 1920s and 1930s. Her connection with the seminars was marginal and was through Malinowski’s star student, her fiancé Godfrey
Wilson. Coming from a Cambridge tradition, she did not share the dismissive approach to history that tended to characterise Malinowski and
his circle.18 This is not to say that she was uninfluenced by her London experiences, from which in any case it is impossible to separate her
close intellectual and emotional interaction with Godfrey, but she was,
as another of Malinowski’s students, Audrey Richards, was later to say,
‘outside the spell under which we were bound’.19 Malinowski appreciated Monica’s intellect, was unusually accommodating towards women
students,20 and, with his apparent need for discipleship, would have liked
to have included her in his circle of devotees. He wrote, in one of his histrionic handwritten addenda to a typed letter to Godfrey, that he was
reading Reaction to Conquest and ‘am full of genuine enthusiasm. This is
by far the best book on Contact yet on the scientific market – and apart
from it, an excellent piece of really scientific anthro’ = sociology’.21 When
he reported that Malinowski had said: ‘“She is a natural functionalist,
she has a mind,”’ Godfrey added that Malinowski ‘certainly has a flair for
making his compliments in the form of boomerangs.’22 In the hothouse
in which Malinowski was the most brilliant bloom, detachment from his
functionalist faith often led to personal dislike, and there are hints that
Malinowski did not greatly care for Monica’s work, or perhaps Monica
herself. He criticised her for being ‘verbose’, which upset her,23 and she
wrote to Godfrey, ‘[h]e . . . think[s] it such a pity that you’re marrying
me’.24
Malinowski’s functionalism was, if not anti-, at least non-historical, and
clearly diverged from her historical orientation. He was difficult to pin
down on the subject of change. As Monica noted, ‘he always sticks to nice
“simple primitive communities”’.25 He tended to be dismissive of history,
believing it generally ‘conjectural’, a malleable creation of the present, of
interest and value only as a pedigree for contemporary societies. Monica,
retrospectively, said she was not a ‘natural functionalist’ and in 1973
told her students about Malinowski’s ‘silly book on change’, probably
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
See Chapter 1 in this volume.
WC, B6.14, Correspondence with Audrey Richards, Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson,
26 March 1974, Elmdon. Audrey Richards was soliciting Monica’s impressions of the
seminars for a planned biography of Malinowski by his daughter, Helena Burke.
Helena Wayne (Malinowska), ‘Bronislaw Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women
on His Life and Works’, American Ethnologist, 12, 3 (1985), 529–540.
WC, B4.4, Bronislaw Malinowski/Godfrey Wilson, 1 Dec. 1936, London.
WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Hunter, 24 Oct. 1933, London.
Ibid., Godfrey Wilson/Monica Hunter, 10 Sept. 1933, London.
WC, B1, Monica Hunter/Godfrey Wilson, 23 Dec. [1934], Hogsback.
WC, B5.1, Monica Hunter/David Hunter, 4 April [1936], London.
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referring to a posthumous collection of his writings.26 She stressed that
she and Godfrey were interested in social change rather than the culture
contact that was Malinowski’s shibboleth. They chose the title of their
1945 book, The Analysis of Social Change, to emphasise diachronic change
rather than synchronic contact.27
That book was written in a condensed style that probably owed more
to Godfrey than Monica. As Audrey Richards, their close friend and a
sympathetic reader, said in her review: ‘Definition follows definition with
a speed that leaves the reader breathless. Hypotheses are outlined with the
elegance of a geometric theorem and with similar dogmatism . . . there are
sufficient stimulating suggestions to make the basis of a dozen articles or
even books, but in their present condensed form they fail to convince.’ It
seemed to her ‘a brilliant if perhaps a premature book’.28 Lucy Mair saw
their treatment of social change as predominantly cultural, but believed it
was the first anthropological work to use this concept in its title.29 Written
in very difficult wartime circumstances, in ‘Northern Rhodesia, South
Africa, Middle East’, it bears the stamp of the personal and intellectual
tensions that Monica and Godfrey underwent while writing. Though
widely respected as an attempt to grapple with the obdurate theme of the
enlargement of scale and its effects, ‘the great book’, as Godfrey called
it, never had the impact the authors expected.30 Nevertheless, Monica
was to perceive a direct line between it and the Oxford History. To her, as
she wrote to J. E. Goldthorpe, the sociologist of East Africa, the attempt
to write the history of the peoples of South Africa was ‘an application
of the general theme of our “Analysis”: the change from isolation to
wider interaction’. When she employed a young UCT historian in 1965
as researcher for the first volume of the Oxford History she gave him a
26
27
28
29
30
WC, J5, UCT lecture notes, Social Anthropology II, 1973; Phyllis M. Kaberry, ed., The
Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1945).
WC, A2.15, Anthropology in South Africa, recorded for Jom [recte Jim] Fox, Behavioral
Studies Center, April 1972.
Audrey Richards, ‘Social Change in Central Africa’, Review of The Analysis of Social
Change’, Spectator, 15 February 1946. Audrey Richards, older than Monica and Godfrey, had always been sceptical of the analytical ambitions of The Analysis. A reading
of Monica and Godfrey’s correspondence and other writings suggests that, typically,
Monica identified factual inconsistencies in, and made measured qualifications of, Godfrey’s theoretical insights. In this, Audrey was perhaps closer to Monica than Godfrey.
Lucy Mair, ‘Malinowski and the Study of Social Change’ in Raymond Firth, ed., Man
and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Malinowski (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1957), 232.
Godfrey Wilson and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change, vii; WC, B2, Godfrey Wilson/Monica Wilson, 12 April 1943, A.P.O. [Army Post Office] Durban; Seán
Morrow, ‘“This is from the Firm”: The Anthropological Partnership of Monica and
Godfrey Wilson’, paper presented at Monica Hunter Wilson Centenary Conference,
24–26 June 2008, Hogsback.
‘Part of One Whole’
289
copy of The Analysis of Social Change as a guide to her thinking on the
project.31
Monica and Murdock
Monica’s views on history before she embarked on the Oxford History in
the 1960s were put with particular clarity in 1952 in her correspondence
with the American anthropologist George Murdock. An article he published in the American Anthropologist started with a critique of African
Systems of Kinship and Marriage, to which Monica had contributed.
Murdock criticised what he took to be contemporary British anthropology’s lack of interest in history and how cultures change over time.32
She replied that she wanted to rebut the charge that ‘we’ ignore history.
It was true of Malinowski, she said, and, for reasons of space, of African
Systems of Kinship and Marriage, but not of a number of Malinowski’s
pupils such as Evans-Pritchard. She continued: ‘A number of us who
were bred in history schools feel very strongly that facts are not intelligible in the contemporary moment alone and fought a long battle with
Malinowski and others on it. We thought we had won.’ She hoped Murdock would look at her Good Company and tell her whether it ‘gives you
the history you want or not’.33
In reply Murdock acknowledged the use of documentary sources and
oral traditions by such as Evans-Pritchard, but taxed the British, using
Gluckman’s work on the Lozi as a particularly egregious example, with
ignoring ‘cultural distributions, which we Americans have developed
some skill in interpreting’.34 Replying further, Monica in effect dismissed
cultural distribution as speculative and premature, without a sufficient
empirical basis: ‘In short, I think that the returns from distributional
31
32
33
34
WC, uncat. material, Analysis of Social Change: Business, Monica Wilson/J. E. Goldthorpe, 10 Feb. 1968, [Rondebosch, Cape Town]. The historian was the second author
of this chapter.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage
(London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1950); George
Peter Murdock, ‘British Social Anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 53, 4 (1951),
465–473.
WC, uncat. corr., George Murdock, Monica Wilson/G. P. Murdock, 13 Feb. 1952,
Rondebosch, Cape Town. Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (Oxford:
Oxford University Press for the International African Institute) had appeared the previous year.
Ibid., G. P. Murdock/Monica Wilson, 20 Feb. 1952, New Haven, CT. Murdock was
crucial in developing the ‘Standard Cross-Cultural Sample . . . a cumulative and collaborative data-base of coded variables on maximally diverse and ethnographically bestdescribed societies used by scholars in the social sciences’, the context of his ‘cultural distributions’. See ‘Standard Cross-Cultural Sample’ by Murdock’s collaborator
Douglas R. White in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2007, 2nd edition,
http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/pub/IntEncyStdCross-CulturalSample.pdf (accessed 18
July 2009).
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Inside African Anthropology
studies at this stage are small, in most African areas, compared with the
returns from detailed fieldwork and analysis of the interrelation between
different aspects of the same culture.’35 Murdock replied that it would
be sterile to wait for thirty years to do the sort of study she recommended, and that field research and comparative and distributional exercises should go together. With a sideswipe on distributional grounds at
Monica’s Nyakyusa age-villages, he concluded that the skilfully constructed ‘“still pictures”’ of the British anthropologists were often ‘as “speculative” as the wildest flights of the Kulturkreis diffusionists, and can be
demonstrated to be false by sound distributional technique’.36
In an undated, emollient, draft letter, Monica acknowledged she had
been mistaken in suggesting that empirical study must precede, rather
than go hand in hand, with analysis, though she remained sceptical that
available material would yet make such analysis possible: ‘About the need
for historical depth in anthropological studies I have no doubt whatsoever; our only difference turns on whether it is possible with the sort of
material we have.’ Could he, she asked mischievously, carry out a distributional study on some part of southern Africa himself, to show how to
achieve historical depth with available materials?37
This correspondence should be seen in relation to the developing
African historiography of its day. As it proceeded, Monica shifted ground
slightly. She now acknowledged, if not the cogency of his generalisations,
his attempt to make them, and, by implication, the limitations of intensely
organised, time-specific, ethnographies. She was clear, however, that historical deductions based on insufficient evidence were not history at all.
In other words, she re-emphasised her belief, which went back to her
Cambridge days, that in contemporary conditions ethnography was the
only possible mode for writing the history of African societies. This did
not mean, as she later said, that she was a naı̈ve empiricist. She dismissed
the advice she said she had received at Cambridge before her Pondoland fieldwork to ‘go without any preconceived ideas’ as ‘nonsense’.
She was adamant that observation is ‘shaped by previous experience’.38
Though Murdock claimed to be researching historically, his broad-brush
interpretations seemed to her at variance with the emphasis on detailed
35
36
37
38
WC, uncat. corr., George Murdock, Monica Wilson/G. P. Murdock, 9 April 1952,
Rondebosch, Cape Town.
Ibid., G. P. Murdock/Monica Wilson, 18 April 1952, New Haven, CT. Murdock refers
to the diffusion of supposed cultural complexes, a concept particularly discredited by
its association with National Socialist ideas of Aryan expansion.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/G. P. Murdock, n.p., n.d. [but responding to G. P. Murdock’s
letter of 18 April 1952].
WC, Talks and Addresses, Box 2 (partly cat.), draft and typescript notes for ‘The
Application of Scientific Method in the Social Field’, address to [UCT] Science Society,
May 1963. Here Monica also refers extensively to E. H. Carr’s recent What is History?
(London: Macmillan, 1961).
‘Part of One Whole’
291
evidence and the eye for exceptions and inconsistencies intrinsic to historical research. This correspondence shows her approach as distinctly
historically oriented.
In the 1950s African history was about to come of age. Historians
like Jan Vansina would soon provide the methodology and comparative
framework required to write histories of African societies. This revolution
in the discipline, which began in tropical Africa and was directly related to
decolonisation, took some time to infiltrate the white-ruled south, where
apartheid seemed to be tightening its grip. As one who kept up with the
latest literature in her own and related fields, Monica realised that the old
Eurocentric approaches to the study of the African past had finally been
jettisoned and that new approaches were beginning to produce scholarly
histories of African societies for the first time. It was at this point that she
herself moved onto a more overtly historical track, one, she believed, she
had never really left in the first place.
Monica’s Return to History
Most weekday mornings Monica took tea with colleagues in the African
Studies tearoom in the UCT Arts Building. Perhaps her closest colleague
was Jack Simons, a historical sociologist whose doctorate at the London
School of Economics had been supervised by Malinowski. Simons had
done fieldwork in the township of Langa in the 1940s, and in the 1950s
was beginning to prepare, with his activist wife Ray Alexander, the study
published in 1969 as Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850 to 1950.39
In the late 1950s she increasingly interacted with a historian colleague,
Leonard Thompson, who had become as aware as she, through time in
London and then being invited to Ghana soon after its independence,
of the new currents in African historiography. Thompson began to say,
as he would often in later years, that South African history needed to
be decolonised.40 To Monica, as to Thompson, showing that African
societies were as worthy of study as white-ruled ones, and writing the
country’s history with the black majority always in mind, was a project
strongly opposed to apartheid.
Apartheid policies threatened destruction of much that she held dear,
from Lovedale to UCT’s academic freedom. Early in 1959, when some
39
40
H. J. and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1969). In her book on Langa, Monica acknowledged her debt to Simons
for material, but there is no evidence that she had access to his fieldnotes from the
1940s (Monica Wilson and Archie Mafeje, Langa. A Study of Social Groups in an African
Township (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1, note 3).
The second author of this chapter heard him say this many times in the 1960s. The
Wilson–Thompson collaboration was close because the History Department was then
in the Arts Building.
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Inside African Anthropology
universities were trying to oppose the imposition of apartheid on them,
South Africa’s minister of External Affairs repeated the myth that ‘[t]he
Bantu began to move from the North across the Limpopo just . . . when
Van Riebeeck landed in Table Bay’.41 The implication was that South
Africa’s whites had settled an empty land and had as much claim to
it as anyone else. Explicitly to refute this myth, Monica wrote a paper
for African Studies on the early history of the Transkei and Ciskei. This
drew upon records, collected and published by the historian Theal many
years before, of those shipwrecked along the south-eastern coast of South
Africa. These demonstrated that Bantu speakers had lived there from at
least the sixteenth century.42 Then in the early 1960s she and Thompson
decided to edit a major new collaborative history of South Africa, with
‘interaction’ as its major theme. The imperial historian John Galbraith, a
friend of Thompson’s who taught at the University of California, was initially to have been a third editor, but he soon dropped out of the project.
Detailed planning of what became the two-volume Oxford History of
South Africa began in California in 1963–4. Thompson had moved to the
University of California, Los Angeles; Monica was on sabbatical at Stanford. That her name was to come before his as editor of both volumes
indicated that, though not a historian, she was the main driver of this
historical project. In choosing contributors, Thompson did not simply
favour historians and Monica anthropologists: Thompson was keen to
have the anthropologist Hilda Kuper as a contributor, and Monica considered UCT historian Eric Axelson until Thompson firmly rejected
this possibility: ‘if in any doubt at all, read his published work,’ he told
her.43 At one point Monica said she feared that ‘there is really a cleavage between us as to priorities: you, a historian, think the chronology
should be dominant: I, an anthropologist, must work from observation
to deductions’.44 While historians were often to say that her chapters
did not have a sufficient sense of chronology, she remained critical of
historians for their ‘and then and then’ approach, as she put it in 1980.45
41
42
43
44
45
Die Burger, 1 April 1959. See Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
Monica Wilson, ‘The Early History of the Transkei and Ciskei’, African Studies, 18, 5
(1959), 167–179. She also contributed ‘Myths of Precedence’ to Allie Dubb, ed., Myth
in Modern Africa (Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1960). Leonard Thompson
did not acknowledge her work in his Political Mythology of Apartheid, where his stress
was on Afrikaner political mythology, an area that Monica did not deal with directly.
WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 16 July 1964, London.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 29 Nov. 1965, n.p.
Ibid., Martin West, Monica Wilson/Martin West, 17 Nov. 1980, Hogsback; she referred
to the chapters by Lye in William F. Lye and Colin Murray, Transformations on the
Highveld: The Tswana and Southern Sotho (Cape Town: David Philip, 1980). Given her
remark, it is surprising that she thought of asking her colleague Axelson to contribute:
much of his writing verged on antiquarianism in its concern for ‘what’ and its failure to
ask ‘why’.
‘Part of One Whole’
293
Figure 9.1. Monica Wilson with Leonard and Betty Thompson. Monica’s handwritten caption on the back of the print reads: ‘Lake Arrowhead, 1963 UCLA.’46
The two editors were at one, however, in emphasising the black majority
throughout the History. This was implicit, for example, in their decision to
have separate chapters for Natal and the Highveld, rather than the standard approach of following ‘the Vooktrekkers around the country in one
chapter’. Monica accepted without demur when Thompson rejected her
suggestion of separate chapters on the creation of the nineteenth-century
African kingdoms. That, he argued, ‘is only a portion of the . . . historical
experience of the people of Natal and the High Veld in this period’.47
‘How deeply glad I am that you and I have been in such complete harmony on all the basic issues related to our work,’ Thompson wrote to
her as the second volume was about to appear.48
For the first volume, published in 1969 and the only one to appear
subsequently in paperback,49 she co-wrote an introduction and contributed four chapters: on hunters and herders, the Nguni, the Sotho and
46
47
48
49
WC, N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups.
WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 2 April 1964, Los Angeles; ibid.,
Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 12 May 1964, Los Angeles.
Ibid., Thompson, Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 11 May [1971], New Haven,
CT.
It was republished as Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds, A History of South
Africa to 1870 (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1982).
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Inside African Anthropology
the Cape’s eastern frontier. Only in the last of these did whites enter
the story in any significant way. She was keen to know what her most
talented African student, Archie Mafeje, thought of her work and sent
him the draft chapters as they were completed. He had been her collaborator in the Langa township project and while she was working on
the Oxford History he was at Cambridge. By this time a close bond had
developed between them, and Monica regarded him virtually as a son.
They addressed each other frankly. She asked him if he thought that
her draft chapter on the Eastern frontier had, as an earlier critic had
said, ‘left out the whites’.50 In this as in her other chapters, she drew
upon her anthropological knowledge and wide reading of the primary
sources. Though some historians dismissed her chapters as ‘not proper
history’, because they did not have enough chronological underpinning,
they remain of great value today.
The editors’ theme was ‘the interaction between people of diverse origins, languages, technologies, ideologies, and social systems, meeting on
South African soil’,51 or ‘cooperation and conflict’.52 The problem was to
assemble a team capable of dealing with it adequately. Thompson thought
J. S. Marais of the University of the Witwatersrand the only ‘objective
scholar’ of the Dutch period, ‘an astonishing and, for us, an unfortunate
fact’. When he could not undertake the chapter on the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Cape Colony, Thompson suggested that he himself
and John Galbraith, then still on the editorial team, might have to write it.
That chapter was crucial ‘because it is the first one which has as the central theme the interaction between white settler and other peoples in South
Africa. Therefore we feel it is of the greatest importance [that] the chapter
be written by a person who is known to be thoroughly sympathetic to
the objectives of the editors.’53 This was a central issue throughout the
shaping of the book. Eventually the editors gathered a team that satisfied
them. Some potential contributors were approached but declined (Keith
Hancock, Hilda Kuper, Ellen Hellmann, Sheila van der Horst, Eric
Stokes, C. W. de Kiewiet), some became ill and withdrew (J. S. Marais,
Leo Marquard), some were considered, but were deemed unsuitable or
were not available (Eric Axelson, Godfrey le May, F. A. van Jaarsveld,
Isaac Schapera, Marcus Arkin, Jack Simons, Philip Mayer, Noel Garson,
50
51
52
53
WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Archie Mafeje, 11 May 1966.
Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds, The Oxford History of South Africa, vol 1:
South Africa to 1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), v.
For example, WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 2 April 1964, Los
Angeles.
WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 9 Jan. 1964, Los Angeles. Finally
the chapter was written by the young May Katzen of UCT. Her career as a South African
historian was cut short by her having to leave Cape Town for England after she had
been detained for anti-apartheid activities.
‘Part of One Whole’
295
Jeffrey Butler), some produced work that the editors thought inadequate
(Ralph Horwitz, Peter Carstens).54 Clement Goodfellow, who was to
have written on the late nineteenth century, had to flee South Africa
because of his involvement in the African Resistance Movement and
in Lesotho took his own life. For the chapter on farming in Volume 2,
various scholars were considered before the editors settled on Monica’s
son Francis, then completing a doctorate at Cambridge. Given their
later critical reviews of the Oxford History, it is ironic that Shula Marks
and Anthony Atmore, ‘both first-class people with the right approach’,
were considered for the Highveld chapter in the first volume.55 Monica
thought that Marks would do a good job on the farming chapter in the
second volume despite having no specific rural experience. She would
need to spend some time actually visiting farms before writing, Monica
said,56 but ultimately she seems not to have been invited to write it.57
The significance of the Oxford History in the liberation politics of the
time should be emphasised, for the attacks on it by academic Marxists
may obscure this. It was, and was meant to be, an intervention against the
historical distortions of apartheid. Powerful figures like General van den
Bergh, the head of the Bureau of State Security, understood this, saying
that Volume 1 ‘confirms the Communists’ view of history’.58 Monica
told the publisher, when insisting on complete accuracy in one of the
settlement maps, ‘it is an explosive document’.59 To the censors, the
first volume appeared to have no contemporary relevance, and it was
available to political prisoners on Robben Island. Neville Alexander, who
was studying for a University of South Africa honours degree in history
while imprisoned, obtained a copy, which went from hand to hand. ‘It
opened up people’s minds,’ Alexander says. ‘I remember even somebody
like Nelson [Mandela] was absolutely fascinated by the fact that it was
these sources that we didn’t even know about, and the book had a major
54
55
56
57
58
59
References to the various authors suggested are scattered through the uncatalogued
correspondence between Monica and Leonard Thompson in WC.
WC, uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson/Monica Wilson, 2 April 1964, Los Angeles. See
Shula Marks, ‘African and Afrikaner History’, Journal of African History, 11, 3 (1970),
435–447; Anthony Atmore and Nancy Westlake, ‘A Liberal Dilemma: A Critique of the
Oxford History of South Africa’, Race, 14, 2 (1972), 107–136. Both Marks and Atmore
had been students of Thompson at UCT and had gone on to London University.
WC, uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 31 Aug. 1964, n.p.
On the project in general see Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African
Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip,
1988), Chapter 15.
WC, uncat. material, Files on Various Subjects Bo–Bu, B.O.S.S., translation of report
of speech by Van den Bergh in Die Transvaler, 6 April 1972. Van den Bergh went on,
‘[i]s not this sort of propaganda consciously aimed at disturbing race relations in the
crudest manner?’
WC, uncat. corr., Oxford History: Corr., Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson/Clarendon Press, Monica Wilson/Peter Sutcliffe, 21 Nov. [1970], Girton College, Cambridge.
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Inside African Anthropology
influence on the way people saw their history – there’s no doubt about
it.’60 This was Monica’s hope and intention. She told Audrey Richards,
using veiled language in case her mail was opened, that she had received
‘a special message from . . . dusky people about the Oxford History which
had provided a new blik for those enclosed’.61
When she went to Lusaka, Zambia in July 1968 for a conference organised by Thompson on African societies in southern Africa, she found herself addressing a gathering mainly of historians. She drew their attention
to the significance of studies of change in economic and social structures.
Commenting self-deprecatingly that she was not ‘a well-brought-up historian who holds fast to chronology and frowns on comparisons that
stray out of time’,62 she launched into a wide-ranging discussion of how
the social structure of African societies had continually changed. Having recently written of the history of the Nguni and Sotho people in
the Oxford History, she was able to draw out threads of comparison, both
between them and with central African societies. She cited Peter Laslett’s
The World We Have Lost as an example of how historians were now finding
‘changes in family structure a fit subject for study’.63 In notes for another
paper, she emphasised the other side of the disciplinary relationship, noting anthropology’s struggle to develop a ‘model that moves’, combining
time and space: ‘Anthropologist reaching out for help from historian,
to make a more realistic model. Some historians welcome co-op [sic].’64
From her chapter on the Sotho in the first volume of the Oxford History, she drew out a set of ‘problems for research in Tswana history’ that
was published in Botswana. She ended that article by saying that ‘[t]he
pursuit of history in a country like Botswana has all the excitement of a
treasure hunt and the relevance of a study that provides a people with
greater understanding of themselves and their roots.’65
In 1967 a new radiocarbon date of 400 A.D. for iron working in Swaziland provided further proof of Bantu speakers moving south centuries
before whites arrived anywhere near the area.66 This greatly excited her,
and she worked news of it into the 1970 Dart Memorial Lecture on ‘The
Thousand Years before Van Riebeeck’ that she delivered at the University
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
Neville Alexander interviewed by Seán Morrow, Cape Town, 3 March 2008.
Archives and Rare Books Division, London School of Economics (LSE), Audrey
Richards Papers (Richards), 16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 25 Aug. 1975,
Hogsback. ‘Blik’ is Afrikaans for an insight or view. It is unclear precisely who these
‘dusky people’ were.
Monica Wilson, ‘Changes in Social Structure’, 71.
Ibid., 78 and note 31; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).
WC, uncat. material, Occasional Papers: Talks and Addresses, 1967–69; ibid., Occasional Papers 1967–68, notes for talk on ‘The Role of the Anthropologist in the Twentieth Century’, n.d.
Monica Wilson, ‘Problems for Research in Tswana History’, Botswana Notes and News,
3 (1971), 73.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/‘Dear Neglected Son’ [Archie Mafeje], 15 June 1967, Hogsback.
‘Part of One Whole’
297
of the Witwatersrand.67 This was a bold survey of what was known about
South Africa before the Dutch arrived. The following year the second
volume of the Oxford History, another tour de force, appeared, to which
she contributed a chapter on the history of peasant communities. She
feared the banning of the whole work in South Africa, and was determined to see it read in South Africa. Wishing to display the mentality of
the government, she insisted that Oxford University Press bring out a
South African edition of the second volume, in which the chapter by Leo
Kuper on African nationalism was replaced by 53 blank pages. This was
done on the assumption that the book would be banned if the chapter
remained, because it quoted banned sources. In the event, it was not
banned, and the incident caused a major fallout, with Kuper accusing
her of censorship. It was a most unfortunate way for a great historical
project to end.68 The attacks on the volumes by the Marxists must also
have wounded her, but she never responded directly to them. Had she
done so, she would probably have said that they were missing the point,
but she recognised that history writing is an ongoing process in which
no one has the last word. Her interest was South Africa’s early history,
not debates about capital and its relationship to racism. She would have
been dismissive of the relatively recent assessment by Ben Magubane, an
eminent sociologist with a strong interest in anthropology, that the Oxford
History was ‘the ultimate word of liberalism’s irrelevant wisdom’, which
‘exemplifies wishful thinking and the limits of bourgeois thought’ and
‘was unable to go beyond the limits imposed by its interest in the status
quo’. He went on to make the bizarre claim that ‘[t]he intellectual inertia
or indifference to historical reality exhibited by Wilson can be explained
by Freudian theory as resulting from an individual’s wish to hide what
is shameful, fearful and socially unacceptable. The dispossession of the
Africans and its consequences are extremely unpleasant to contemplate
and equally unpleasant to explain.’69
As she moved towards retirement from UCT in 1973, Monica
delivered the third Dugmore Memorial Lecture in Grahamstown, in
67
68
69
Published as Monica Wilson, The Thousand Years Before Van Riebeeck (Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press for the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, 1970).
Leo Kuper accused her of ‘cowardice’ and published his correspondence about the
chapter in an appendix to his Race, Class and Power: Ideology and Revolutionary Change
in Plural Societies (Gloucester: Gerald Duckworth, 1974), 289–314. Some years later
the two were reconciled, with Kuper regretting the break in their ‘long friendship’ (WC,
uncat. corr., Thompson, P. H. Sutcliffe/Leonard Thompson, 9 Feb. 1973, Oxford);
ibid., Kuper, Kuper/Monica Wilson, 2 June 1978, Los Angeles. Thompson called Kuper
‘irritating’ (ibid., Thompson, Thompson/Secretary, Clarendon Press, 15 March 1973,
New Haven, CT).
Bernard Magubane, ‘Whose Memory, Whose History’ in Hendrik E. Stolten, ed., History Making and Present Day Politics (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2007), 261,
264. For Monica’s interest in psychohistory and the work of Erik Erikson see note 96
below.
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which she spoke of the key role of the interpreter on the frontier.70
The following year she participated in a conference at Rhodes University on the history of the Transkei and Ciskei, and wrote a chapter for
the published volume that resulted. In this she pointed to areas for further research, drawing attention especially to the need for black writers
to offer new interpretations of the past, an issue with which the historical profession still grapples.71 In 1976 at the opening of the Missionary
Museum in King William’s Town she spoke of the role of missionaries on
the frontier as agents of conquest and servants of God.72 She summed
up much of her thinking about South African history in her Alfred and
Winifred Hoernlé Memorial Lecture in 1975. This began with a long
section on ‘History and Myth’ before discussing the stifling of truth and
the discovery of new truth. She went on to point to South African realities
and ended with a plea for free speech.73
‘I’ve Always Seen Anthropology and History as Part of
One Whole’
While this chapter emphasises Monica’s overtly historical work, we now
look briefly from the perspective of her historical interests at the studies
on which, with the earlier Reaction to Conquest, her specifically anthropological and ethnographic reputation rests. Between the early 1950s and
late 1970s she published four major monographs based on her and her
husband’s fieldwork in the 1930s, and her 1956 return visit, among the
Nyakyusa and Ngonde of modern Tanzania and Malawi. In these she
increasingly stressed the historical dimension, especially in For Men and
Elders, published in 1979.74 Aspects of her approach were challenged,
particularly by anthropologists Simon Charsley and Michael McKenny
and by Marcia Wright, a historian who taught at Columbia University.75
70
71
72
73
74
75
Monica Wilson, The Interpreters (Grahamstown: 1820 Settlers National Monument
Foundation, 1972). See the Introduction to this volume for a fuller discussion.
Christopher Saunders and Rodney Derricourt, eds, Beyond the Cape Frontier: Studies in
the History of the Transkei and Ciskei (Cape Town: Longman, 1974). Her chapter was
‘Some Fields for Research’.
South African Outlook, March 1976. This was in effect a response to the polemic by N.
Majeke (Dora Taylor) of the Unity Movement on The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest,
(n.p. [Johannesburg]: Society of Young Africa, 1952).
Monica Wilson, . . . ‘So Truth Be in the Field’ . . . (Johannesburg: South African Institute
of Race Relations, 1975).
Monica Wilson, For Men and Elders.
Simon R. Charsley, The Princes of Nyakyusa (Nairobi: East African Publishing, 1969);
Michael G. McKenny, ‘The Social Structure of the Nyakyusa: A Re-evaluation’, Africa,
43, 2 (1973), 91–107; Letters from Dr S. R. Charsley and Professor Michael McKenny,
Africa, 44, 4 (1974), 422–424. For Marcia Wright’s critique see below. See also Chapter
4 in this volume.
‘Part of One Whole’
299
Wright’s German Missions in Tanganyika appeared in 1971.76 A meticulous study based on mission archives, it made relatively little use of the
Wilsons’ work, merely referring to Monica’s Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor as ‘of great value . . . [n]otwithstanding certain [unspecified]
misconstructions of history’.77 She subsequently attacked the Wilsons’
work directly,78 accusing them of projecting the situation in the 1930s
into a past in reality marked by conflict, change and constant reinterpretation. Specifically, they misinterpreted the relationship of religious and
chiefly authority. She alleged that Godfrey had stretched the evidence to
fit a Frazerian ‘divine kings’ theory.79
Replying ‘with reluctance’ to her critics, Monica defended detailed
ethnographic observation. ‘What periods of time (if any)’, she asked,
‘have the three critics spent in Bu-Nyakyusa?’ She also defended her and
Godfrey’s work against Charsley’s charge that it was ‘timeless’. They had
dealt, for example, with Christianity and change, and with diversity, ‘the
cross-section of social change’. While ‘it is true that except in the Constitution of Ngonde [by Godfrey Wilson], the flow of time has not been
the main focus of attention’, her forthcoming For Men and Elders would
combine discussion of ‘the flow of time with analysis of the complex relationships of generations, and of men and women’.80 When it appeared,
she wrote to an old friend: ‘I await brickbats from the anthropologists
who dislike one discussing history, and historians who disapprove of
anthropology.’81
The brickbats hurt: she wrote that ‘a vicious and prompt review of For
Men and Elders by Marcia Wright . . . sank it with most historians’, and
that positive reviews by Aidan Southall and Jan Vansina came too late
to redeem its historical reputation.82 Wright claimed, misreading Monica’s ethnography and her political and social attitudes, that ‘[a]nxiety
about the consequences of radical change permeates and perhaps motivates the book. Diversity then emerges as part of a counter-ideology,
liberal towards traditional values and hostile to the new socialism.’ More
cogently, though with exaggeration, Wright stated that a book such as
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika 1891–1941: Lutherans and Moravians in
the Southern Highlands (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Ibid., 24; Monica Wilson, The Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor (Cape Town:
School of African Studies, UCT, 1958).
Marcia Wright, ‘Nyakyusa Cults and Politics in the Later Nineteenth Century’ in Terence O. Ranger and Isaria Kimambo, eds, The Historical Study of African Religion (London: Heinemann, 1971), 153–170.
Ibid., 156.
Letter from Dr Monica Wilson, Africa, 45, 2 (1975), 199–205. Monica refers to Godfrey
Wilson, ‘The Constitution of Ngonde’, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, 3 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1968 (1939)).
WC, uncat. corr., Desmond Clark, Monica Wilson/Clark, 6 March 1978, Hogsback.
WC, uncat. corr., George Park, Monica Wilson/George Park, 22 June 1982, Hogsback.
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For Men and Elders that ‘rejects’ documentary evidence ‘is seriously handicapped’. The book was ‘disappointing’ in spite of some ‘highly suggestive materials’.83 The doyen of contemporary African historians, Jan
Vansina, by contrast, called it ‘an extraordinary book . . . a “longitudinal”
study of an African society . . . the social history of a rural community
in the colonial and postcolonial age.’ He noted that broad statements
were supported with validating cases, which ‘historians welcome with
glee’. He commented that, though Monica was an anthropologist and
functionalist, ‘the Wilsons never were “pure” functionalists. They were
fascinated by social change, almost right from the onset.’ He considered
Monica’s account of change ‘remarkably clear’, and praised her eschewing of unsupported generalisation and her focus on the specific: ‘Her
work beautifully shows how a generalization such as “dependency” is
just that: a big generalization that attempts to explain situations on a
world-wide scale, or at least a continental one . . . the local society is not
just a dune to be moulded by the dependency winds.’ He concluded:
‘this is an important book . . . [it] carries a message to historians, especially social historians. It also is grist to the mill of economic historians
in that it shows the coincidence of so much social change with economic
change.’84
In advance of her historical colleagues Monica foreshadowed what
would later be called ‘contemporary history’. Writing to Audrey
Richards, her close friend, about For Men and Elders, she said she was
convinced that analysis of diversity was the key to understanding change.
‘My historian friends’, she said, ‘look shocked when I say “diversity is
change in the contemporary moment” – they can’t conceive of a contemporary moment of change, which I think is arthritic!’ She said she was
returning to their 1930s approach where both worked in areas that were
changing profoundly.85 Richards got the point, saying that the second
chapter, ‘A Model that Moves’, should be ‘read by every student of
change’. Monica’s long and arduous work on the Oxford History, she
thought, had given this book ‘a perspective that no other anthropologist
has achieved’.86
83
84
85
86
Marcia Wright, ‘Change in Southern Tanzania’, Review of Monica Wilson’s For Men
and Elders, Journal of African History, 20, 2 (1979), 300–301.
Jan Vansina, ‘Review of Monica Wilson, For Men and Elders’, African Economic History,
8 (1979), 267–269. James G. Ellison, ‘Transforming Obligations, Performing Identity:
Making the Nyakyusa in a Colonial Context’, D.Phil. thesis (University of Florida,
1999) considers the controversies over Nyakyusa history.
WC, B6.14, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 21 Feb. 1974, Hogsback.
Ibid., Audrey Richards/Monica Wilson, 30 March 1978, Cambridge. Monica’s emphasis
on the complexities of change and on the absolute need for knowledge of particular
circumstances is summarised – typically, in relation to a specific historical context – in
her ‘Zig-Zag Change’, Africa, 46, 4 (1976), 399–409.
‘Part of One Whole’
301
Monica’s approach to history is apparent in relation to what she saw as
contemporary anthropology’s loss of direction. Clarity of aim, she wrote
to Richards in 1982, ‘is dismally absent’ and the discipline ‘is in a fog
and a bog’.87 She wrote to Leonard Thompson in 1982 that she had
become increasingly historical. She was excited by contemporary French
historians ‘using so much of what I would call anthropology’, and by John
Roberts’s Penguin History of the World,88 with its ‘magnificent’ sweep. Of
Roberts she wrote to Muriel Bradbrook, ‘I’ve always seen anthropology
and history as part of one whole and it’s good to read a historian who
does so and has really digested all the admirable work done in France.’89
She thought John Iliffe outstanding amongst contemporary historians
of Africa writing in English and his A Modern History of Tanganyika
‘the best history of any part of Africa I have read’.90 He grasped what
small-scale societies were like, what change in transport implied, and
the importance of solid evidence. Also, she added, ‘he can write’.91 She
criticised much South African historiography for failing to grapple with
small-scale societies or use anthropological insights. When historians
read no anthropology early, ‘it seems almost as if they had missed learning
to speak during the babbling stage’.92 Her criticisms were of historians,
not of history as a discipline. She quoted approvingly R. H. Tawney’s
alleged remark that historians need ‘not more documents but stronger
boots’, and told her students in 1973 that though historians had provided
rich comparative material, with exceptions they had tended to do so about
limited fields within a limited range of societies.93
The reception of the Oxford History made clear the division between
the ‘liberal’ history, emphasising ‘interaction’, of Monica and her coauthors, and the ‘neo-Marxist’ history of many of their critics. She did
not find contemporary French Marxist ideas on small-scale societies
helpful to her historical analysis of gender and generational relations in
Bunyakyusa. Marxism seemed to her ‘an ephemeral terminology’, and
characterising husbands and wives as members of different and competing classes completely unhelpful.94 Her commitment to empiricism, and
deep knowledge of the eastern Cape frontier in the nineteenth century,
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
LSE/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 30 Sept. 1981, Hogsback.
WC, uncat. corr., Oxford History Reprint, Monica Wilson/Leonard Thompson, 23
Jan. 1982, Hogsback. See J. M. Roberts, Pelican History of the World (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, [1976] 1980).
WC, uncat. corr., Muriel Bradbrook, Monica Wilson/‘Brad’, 11 Feb. 1982, Hogsback.
WC, uncat. corr., Elizabeth Colson, Monica Wilson/Elizabeth Colson, 27 April 1981,
Hogsback.
LSE/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 28 Nov. 1979, Hogsback.
WC, uncat. corr., Martin West, Monica Wilson/Martin West, 15 July 1976 [Hogsback].
WC, J5, UCT Lecture Notes, Social Anthropology I, 1973.
WC, uncat. corr., Jeff Guy, Monica Wilson/Jeff Guy, July 1979, Hogsback.
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Inside African Anthropology
was shown in her essay on the Xhosa prophèt figure Mhlakaza. Published
in French, it unfortunately found few readers in southern Africa.95
Finally, Monica’s broad understanding of history should be noted. For
example, the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s attempt
to combine evolutionary thought and religion, emphasising the historicity of the Christian revelation, resonated with her sense of a world
where God was incarnate in and revealed through humanity’s struggle
towards understanding and self-consciousness.96 She closely followed
Erik Erikson’s use of psychoanalysis in historical studies.97 In the late
1950s, reflecting on the emergence of language and human society, and
taking an evolutionary-historical perspective that few historians of the
time would have contemplated, she spent much time watching baboon
behaviour at Cape Point with Kenneth Hall, Professor of Psychology at
UCT, and his students.98 She was acutely aware, as has been seen, of the
importance of archaeology in understanding the African past.
The Z. K. Matthews Biography: A Memoir of an
‘Interpreter’
Monica’s final book-length study was her edited biography and memoir
of Z. K. Matthews. She had worked with him at Fort Hare and he
shared her view of the importance of history.99 Her old friend Frieda
Matthews had found the unevenness of the papers left by her husband,
one of the most prominent black intellectuals of his day, difficult to
95
96
97
98
99
Monica Wilson, ‘Mhlakaza prophète d’une apocalypse en Afrique australe’ in C. Julien,
Les Africains (Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1977), 207–209.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959; Le
phenomène humaine first published Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1955); WC, Talks and
Addresses, Box 2 (partly cat.), ‘The Growth of Self-Consciousness in Man and Society’, paper by Monica Wilson opening Arts and Sciences Festival at Rhodes University,
September 1962. See also ibid., Monica Wilson, ‘Cleavage and Coherence in Southern Africa’, paper to conference for anthropologists, Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, New York, 13 March 1964.
Monica was instrumental in bringing Erikson to UCT to deliver the Ninth T. B. Davie
Memorial Lecture in 1968. See Erik H. Erikson Insight and Freedom (Cape Town:
University of Cape Town, 1968). His psychohistorical studies include Young Man
Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958).
The extent of her ethnographic fieldwork with baboons is clear from the reports
and correspondence in WC, uncat. material, Monica Wilson Own Research: Animal
Sociology. She advised her students to read classic works on animal behaviour such
as David Lack, The Life of the Robin (London: H. F. and G. Witherby, 1943) and
F. Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).
Monica Wilson, ed., Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews:
Southern Africa 1901 to 1968 (London: Rex Collings, 1981); J. W. Raum, ‘Zacharia
Keodirelang Matthews as a “Social Anthropologist”’ in L. Kropackek and P. Skalnik,
eds, Africa 2000: Forty Years of African Studies in Prague (n.p.: Set Out, 2001), esp. 191.
Matthews published a history of the Tshidi Barolong. For more on Matthews and Fort
Hare see Chapter 6 in this volume.
‘Part of One Whole’
303
deal with. With family backing, she approached Monica with the idea
of her contributing ‘the Introductory Biographical sketch Zac’s Memoirs
require’. ‘My answer . . . dear Frieda is Yes!’ she said.100 As she wrote to
Desmond Clark, ‘if black asks that sort of thing of white nowadays in
this country one does not refuse!’101 The project quickly escalated into a
much more substantial task than Frieda had envisaged.102
Freedom for my People is a hybrid, both an edited version of material left
by Matthews and an account by Monica of areas and periods where his
memoirs were inadequate. These areas, oddly, considering how central
each was to his life, were Matthews’s political activities and his academic
career at Fort Hare. Monica was aware that she was not well qualified
to write about Matthews as a political leader, but she was asked by the
family to carry out the assignment and realised that the book was required
politically and could not be postponed.103 Some of the inadequacies,
such as the treatment of the Treason Trial, can be put down to Frieda
Matthews only coming across relevant letters after the book had been
published.104
Monica believed the importance of the biography was that it showed
‘what it was like to grow up black in Kimberley, and at school in Lovedale
and on to Fort Hare’.105 There were personal as well as political reasons
for taking on the task.106 She wrote to David Philip, noting the limitations
of the material with which she would have to work, but saying that she
had agreed to undertake the project
out of love for both Z. K. and Frieda and close family ties. (Her mother
was a friend of my mother’s; Godfrey was friendly with Z. K. and chose
him for Tim’s godfather; I worked on Z. K. [sic] staff – a lecturer in his
department – at Fort Hare, and the friendship continued until his death; I
still visit Frieda and she me when distance permits).107
Monica might have added that David Hunter, Monica’s father, was a
mission colleague and friend of Frieda’s father John Knox Bokwe, ‘both
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
WC, uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews, Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 7 June 1976,
Hogsback.
Ibid., Desmond Clark, Monica Wilson/Desmond Clark, 6 March 1978, Hogsback.
Ibid., Frieda Matthews, Frieda Matthews/Monica Wilson, 24 May 1976, Gaborone;
ibid., Frieda Matthews/Monica Wilson, 26 June 1976, Gaborone.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 7 June 1976, Hogsback.
WC, uncat. files, Z. K. Matthews Biography, Monica Wilson/David Philip, 15 March
1982 [Hogsback].
WC, uncat. corr., Elizabeth Colson, Monica Wilson/Elizabeth Colson, 27 April 1981,
Hogsback.
When David Philip was dilatory about publishing the South African edition, she taxed
him with risking the topicality of the book. WC, uncat. corr., David Philip, Monica
Wilson/David Philip, 14 March 1980, Hogsback.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/David Philip, 2 Dec. 1976, Hogsback.
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Inside African Anthropology
Presbyterians through and through’, as Francis Wilson says, while she
and Frieda were school-friends at Lovedale, and remained close.108 The
Hunter-Wilsons and Bokwe-Matthewses were part of the religious and
educational elite centred on Lovedale and Fort Hare. This goes far
towards explaining Monica’s sense of the importance of an inclusive
southern African history, her complete lack of racism, and her insistence
on intellectual quality whenever there was educational opportunity.
Monica set about the research and writing promptly and efficiently.
She insisted that material of which there was no copy must be brought
to her by trustworthy individuals in person. She sent detailed requests
for information to Frieda. She arranged publishing contracts with Rex
Collings in London and David Philip in Cape Town. She wrote to numerous individuals who had interacted with Matthews, and visited the World
Council of Churches in Geneva, stopping off on the way in Nairobi,
where he had worked for a time. Here she stayed with the powerful and,
by many, feared Kenyan attorney-general Charles Njonjo, an ex-Fort
Hare student of hers, who arranged a visa for Monica, a facility not
normally granted to white South Africans.109
Monica was willing to provide loopholes to those in power who might
not want to ban the book, like signing the preface from Cambridge
rather than from within the country, but she wrote to the South African
publisher David Philip: ‘I have considered my own position and have
decided to stand by what I have written. There are certain advantages
in being over 70 and no longer responsible for any one!’110 David Philip
thought that the book might well be banned, and he was prepared if
necessary to publish with blank pages, as with the second volume of the
Oxford History. Monica, it turned out correctly, was more sanguine. She
did not believe it would be banned. If it was, she said, it would ‘seep into
the Republic’.111
Freedom for my People is probably as good a study of Z. K. Matthews as
was possible at that time and in those circumstances. Though preceded
108
109
110
111
Francis Wilson interviewed by Seán Morrow, Cape Town, 7 March 2008.
WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence re Z. K.’s Biography, Charles Njonjo, Monica
Wilson/Charles Njonjo, 15 Feb. 1978, Hogsback; replying from Nairobi on 23 Feb.,
Njonjo says he is ‘delighted . . . that you are editing our dear teacher’s autobiography’.
Burgess Carr, who shortly before this time had been ousted as general secretary of
the Nairobi-based All Africa Council of Churches, commented to Francis Wilson that
Njonjo ‘may have gone to Fort Hare, but none of the Africans who were there with him
would recognize him anymore’ (WC, uncat. corr., photocopy of Burgess Carr/Francis
Wilson, 12 June 1978, Harvard University Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass).
WC, uncat. corr., Correspondence with David Philip re Z. K. Biography, Monica
Wilson/David Philip, 6 Feb. 1978, Hogsback.
Ibid., Monica Wilson/David Philip, 20 July 1978; ibid., David Philip/Monica Wilson,
27 July 1978, Cape Town.
‘Part of One Whole’
305
by some scholarly and popular biographies of ‘traditional’ leaders,112
and autobiographies and biographies of modern, educated black South
Africans,113 it was an innovative record of a major African nationalist
leader. Monica managed to create a coherent narrative out of disparate
documents by Matthews and chapters by herself, sometimes on areas
with which she was not deeply familiar, such as the internal history of
the African nationalism of Matthews’s day. As with much of Monica’s
work, particularly her overtly historical studies, she wrote with a political
as well as scholarly purpose, which in this case was to bring to the fore an
African academic and statesman, ‘a man for reconciliation’, in the words
of an earlier article on him. To her he represented the potentially liberal
and tolerant South Africa under devastating attack in her time.114 She
initially suggested the title of the book be the words of Patrick Henry
in 1765, ‘If this be treason’.115 ‘For a title to be “provocative”’, Monica
wrote to the publisher, ‘is perhaps useful’.116 But Helen Joseph had used
that title, so it became Freedom for My People.117
Conclusion
To the end Monica thought and wrote historically, following a path she
had been on since the beginning of her career. The reading she did
in the early 1980s indicates that she was moving towards social and
environmental history and anthropology of a distinctly modern kind:
‘I’m thinking’, she wrote to Audrey Richards, ‘about a book concerning
this range of mountains [the Amatolas] – the trees, and people, and
112
113
114
115
116
117
The former includes Leonard Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho
1786–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); the latter, Peter Becker, Path of Blood (London:
Longmans, Green, 1962).
See, for example, Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom (London: Faber and Faber, 1954);
Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London: Faber and Faber, 1959); Bloke
Modisane, Blame Me on History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963). In a different
mode is anthropologist Hilda Kuper’s Sobhuza II: Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland
(London: Gerald Duckworth, 1978).
Monica Wilson, ‘Z.K. Matthews: A Man for Reconciliation’ in Francis Wilson and
Dominique Perrot, eds, Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870–1970 (Lovedale:
Lovedale Press; Braamfontein: Spro-Cas, 1972), 557–559, first published in South
African Outlook, July 1968.
WC, uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews, Monica Wilson/Frieda Matthews, 2 Aug. 1978,
n.p. The rhetorical power of the full quotation is clear: ‘“Caesar had his Brutus –
Charles the First, his Cromwell – and George the Third – (‘Treason’, cried the
Speaker) . . . may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it”’ (ibid.,
uncat. files, Z.K. Matthews Biography, transcript of Freedom for My People, ‘final’ (but
some corrections), July 1978.
Ibid., unsorted corr., Corr. with David Philip re Z. K. Biography, Monica Wilson/David
Philip, 3 Aug. 1978, Hogsback.
Helen Joseph, If This Be Treason (London: André Deutsch, 1963).
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Inside African Anthropology
water supplies. A “flyer” in the form of an article for Veld and Flora has
gone off and I want to do the book.’118 Ecology would be the focus, she
said, ‘but history [is] necessary to explain ecological change, and choices
open’.119 This scholarly direction was related to the politics of the time,
in particular the formation of the Ciskei bantustan and the attempt to
incorporate the Hogsback into it. Monica positioned herself in the narrow
space between most of her white neighbours’ rejection of anything to do
with black rule, and her concerns about the corruption, authoritarianism
and neglect of the natural environment that she feared, correctly, would
characterise ‘independent’ Ciskei. She became honorary vice-president
of the Friends of the Ciskei, a liberal group working for welfare, health
and small industries in the area.120 Another spur for this projected work
was undoubtedly the anthropological study of the Essex village of Elmden
inspired by Audrey Richards. As Audrey lived in Elmden, so did Monica
in Hogsback.121
Throughout her life Monica Wilson had a strong sense of the importance of history. She would have liked to open a dialogue between anthropologists and historians, and did what she could to promote one, as
French academics had already done. She was critical of much historical
writing for not asking the relevant questions, and when the opportunity
arose she turned to writing history herself. In so doing, she retained her
anthropological perspective and did not always write as a historian would,
but she showed imagination and originality that made her a pioneer in
historical scholarship in South Africa. While Thompson, her collaborator on the Oxford History, remained primarily a political historian, she
embraced the idea of interdisciplinary work in opening up the study of
the South African past, and especially its pre-colonial past. In particular,
118
119
120
121
LSE/Richards/16/58, Monica Wilson/Audrey Richards, 15 Feb. 1982, Hogsback; ‘The
Late Monica Wilson’ and ‘The Re-Establishment of Yellowwood Forest’, Veld and Flora,
68, 4 (1982), 111–112. For the African environment partly as a subject of historical
study, see J. Ford, The Role of Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly
Problem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). However, a study such as Helge Kjekshus, Ecology
Control and Economic Development in East African History (London: James Currey) was
not published until 1996. Monica’s environmentalism is clear from an inquiry from
Bishop Hugh Montefiore about the theology of man and nature: see WC, uncat. corr.,
Hugh Montefiore/Monica Wilson, 20 Oct., 1973, London; ibid., Monica Wilson/Hugh
Montefiore, n.d. [but Nov. 1973], n.p.
Ibid., uncat. material, Files on Various Subjects, E–G, Emathole, Notes on the History
of Hogsback and the Amathola Mountains, ‘Notes for study of Hogsback’.
Ibid., Affiliations: Minutes of Meeting Friends of the Ciskei Association, 4 Nov. 1979,
Kenilworth.
Marilyn Strathern, Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in NorthWest Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties, Foreword by Audrey Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Monica may also have been influenced by the fact that
W. K. Hancock, the Australian historian of Smuts, had in retirement written Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on His Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972).
‘Part of One Whole’
307
her interest in new advances in archaeology enabled her to grasp South
African history over the centuries in ways no historian of the time did,
while she understood the importance of environmental factors in shaping
historical change. Unlike any historian of her time, she saw South Africa
as part of the wider southern and even central African regions, for her
own work in Central Africa gave her a perspective on South Africa different from that of any other scholar working in the country. She played
a major role in opening up the history of African societies in southern
Africa, and she challenged historians to take forward her own pioneering
work. Historians who reviewed the Oxford History, whether from the left
or the right, failed to appreciate the significance of what she had done.
Now that we can to some extent stand back from the febrile atmosphere
of her time, her significant place in southern African historiography can
be more clearly appreciated.
10
Gleanings and Leavings: Encounters in
Hindsight
Pamela Reynolds
gleanings and leavings
in the combs
of a fieldworker’s archive
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Backward Look’1
Part One
An Adequate Reading
In her 1972 paper ‘The Interpreters’, Monica Wilson talks of the fundamental role that interpreters play on the frontiers between peoples.2
She said, ‘I use interpreter for the man between whose primary function
is communication, and secondary function negotiation.’ His concern is
‘to mediate ideas, law, custom, symbolism’ and, in her opinion, anthropologists and missionaries are interpreters. A real interpreter, she held,
listens as well as talks, is a man of integrity who is personally trusted, and
who can be loyal to his own group and be an intermediary.3
This chapter first considers one type of interpreter, field assistants,
and how just acknowledgment should be given to their contributions to
fieldwork. The matter is very difficult and troublesome and I write in a
tone that I hope is not querulous but inquisitive. The second section is
a reminiscence. My intention is to encourage those writing in hindsight
about Monica Hunter Wilson to do so with due consideration of our
inheritance from her. The challenge is to ascertain how we can achieve
an adequate reading of the products of her labour, of her mode of production, and of the intellectual milieu in which she wrote.
1
2
3
Extract from Seamus Heaney, ‘The Backward Look’, 1975 in Helen Vendler, Seamus
Heaney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
I am grateful to Colleen Crawford Cousins and Thomas Cousins for the contribution of
ideas that I have incorporated into the chapter, and for having edited it.
Monica Wilson, The Interpreters (Grahamstown: The 1820 Settlers National Monument Foundation, Third Dugmore Memorial Lecture), 18, 23; Francis Wilson, ‘Monica
Hunter Wilson: An Appreciation’ in Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008 (1936), 4th
edition), 22–23. See the Introduction of this volume for further discussion of the concept.
308
Gleanings and Leavings
309
In an interrogation of the production of knowledge, Pierre Bourdieu,
speaking in his own defence against his critics, invites us to consider
the logic of the international circulation of ideas. He worries that texts
circulate without their contexts, that they are unaccompanied by the
social space in which they have been produced, that is, in the ‘space of
scientific possibilities in which they constructed themselves’. He feels that
readers often apply to texts categories of perception and interpretation
from a field of production subject to different traditions. In consequence
their perceptions and interpretations ‘have every chance of being more
or less inadequate’.4
In effect Bourdieu warns us that, in critiquing texts, we must remember the context, social space and the production of knowledge plus the
era and traditions of the writers and their readers. Bourdieu believes that
the circulation of texts can generate through the accumulation of misunderstandings a cultural phenomenon that he calls ‘a collective artefact’.
One such is postmodernism. He fears distortion in ‘scientific exchanges’,
and suggests that the distortions be countered by reflexivity. He accuses
his critics of making a false synchrony of his ideas and of fragmenting
his body of work and, in the process, ignoring his mode of intellectual
production in research and writing. He calls for ‘an adequate reading
tied to the very movement of the research’ and for attention to be paid
to ‘the epistemological and social conditions of the intellectual project’,
and he calls for readers to apply a ‘socio-genetic’ point of view towards
‘any creation of the mind’.
To avoid misunderstanding, we could try to reposition ourselves in
the intellectual tradition in order to see the move from common sense
to the construction of an idea (or form of analysis) that links the theoretical and the empirical: that is, to see what is original. In offering a
sort of ‘intellectual autobiography’, Bourdieu tries to act as an informant
on social conditions of the formation of his thought, thus encouraging
a ‘self socio-analysis’. He says that the appearance of radical critique
may disguise intellectual conformity, even conservatism. He is wary of
‘the infantile disorders’ of social science yet he is respectful of ‘the dispositions that define the sociological eye’.5 In discussing our inheritance
from Monica Hunter Wilson, we should ask if we can achieve an adequate
reading; avoid producing a collective artefact; pay full regard to her mode
of intellectual production; and position ourselves in both the intellectual tradition of the 1930s and the second decade of the twenty-first
century.
4
5
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual
Works’ in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma and Moiske Postone, eds, Bourdieu: Critical
Perspectives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 263.
Bourdieu, ‘Concluding Remarks’, 263–264.
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Inside African Anthropology
To add another qualifier to our interrogation of the production of
knowledge, Michel Foucault says that the Delphic Oracle was so enigmatic and obscure ‘that one could not understand it without knowing
what sort of question one was asking’.6 Similarly, in anthropology one
sets out to learn what questions to ask. In weighing Monica Hunter
Wilson’s body of work, we ask what questions she put before herself, and
what sort of questions we are asking in retrospect. Foucault examines
the early Greek notion of parrhesia (truth telling) with regard to finding
out what the truth of a life is. He quotes Plato, who has Socrates say:
‘For I think that whoever is to test a soul sufficiently about correctness
of life or the lack of it needs three things . . . knowledge, kind regard, and
frankness.’7
On Fieldwork
Let us begin by acknowledging the vulnerability of the anthropologist
in the field. Some of my graduate students at Johns Hopkins University
assure me that anthropologists are often dubious persons. They cannot
rely, as can those who work in laboratories, on a protocol in undertaking
fieldwork. Doing ethnography can be heartbreaking, and it is edgy. The
unspoken negotiations that it entails are seldom recognised. The graduates say that having to formulate their work into categories – the collection
of data, the analysis of material, the writing of a monograph – reduces it,
for each process is intricately entangled in untranslatable terms. Many
anthropologists find relations in the field fascinating, challenging and
very demanding. Everyday scenes in research on some topics and with
some people call for subtle or direct negotiations. To enter the field is to
expose oneself. Fieldwork is a fiction, a romance, and no defence ought
to be put up for it, one of them said. We cannot really know about the
character of relations without knowing the tenor and conventions of the
time, said another, who then used Malinowski’s diaries as an example,8
pleading, ‘Write the guy a pass’ – yet, he added, the diaries complicated
the remote scene of ‘the field’ and give it a new dimension.
On Working with an Assistant
There are often four phases that bleed into one another as an ethnography is made: training and theoretical preparation; fieldwork; analysis;
and writing. If the ethnographer requires an assistant at all, it is often
6
7
8
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e),
2001), 103.
Ibid., 98, note 61.
Bronislaw M. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. N. Guterman
(London: Routledge, 1967).
Gleanings and Leavings
311
only for the second phase. Once an assistant is appointed for fieldwork,
a triangulation of relationships between the anthropologist, the assistant(s), and the informant(s) occurs in the field. In critiques of anthropological endeavour, the focus is usually on the relationship between the
anthropologist and the assistant and not on the other two ties, those of
assistant/informant and informant/anthropologist. Perhaps it will help us
to gauge the nature of this complex if we examine these other ties as
carefully.
Let us remember that the relationship between anthropologist and
assistant may develop into something other, may become something
in itself, with mysterious qualities that are more than the sum of the
parts, like the new relationship that can grow between an analyst and an
analysand, or patient. Sigmund Freud said that analytic work involves
two different people, each with a different task.9 The analysand is ‘supposed to be induced to remember something he has experienced and
suppressed’, while the analyst’s task is a work of construction and reconstruction that corresponds extensively to that of the archaeologist. Freud
said, ‘Interpretation depends simply and solely on reconstruction, which
can therefore quite often claim at best only a certain degree of probability.’ This represents only preparatory work, and the analysand’s agreement with the interpretation is only valuable if it is followed by indirect
confirmations. An individual construction is no more than a supposition to be ‘investigated, confirmed, or rejected’.10 The analogy cannot
be pushed too far but for our purposes I suggest that the relationship
between anthropologist and assistant in the field is not easily translatable: each makes different contributions and these are hard to measure.
One more similarity is striking. Just as Freud sought confirmation for
his interpretations through agreement and investigation, so did Monica.
The bedrock of Monica’s extraordinarily reliable method was, beside the
accumulation of minute details, the careful check she made of the verity
of everything she found out.
The question remains: how ought the contribution of an assistant to be
acknowledged? It could happen that an interpreter is much cleverer than
the anthropologist; has greater originality in analysis; knows much more;
is a very competent writer; has a position in a community that allows for
interviews of greater depth and importance; and whose contribution to
the compilation of a monograph equals, if it does not surpass, that of the
anthropologist. Let us grant that possibility.
I shall reflect on my experiences in working with and without assistants.
My ethnographic research has involved five studies in southern Africa,
each of between 18 months and five years, and another less intense one
9
10
Sigmund Freud, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ in A. Phillips, ed., Sigmund Freud: Wild
Analysis (London: Penguin, 2002 (1937)), 212.
Ibid., 213, 219.
312
Inside African Anthropology
in the USA. In three, I had an assistant. The first was from the area
and a pleasure to be with, amenable, kind to the children with whom we
were working but not otherwise contributing significantly to the study. In
the second case, I brought an assistant from the city to the countryside.
It did not work well because the rural people were not interested in
working with a man from the city. I hired a local called Satan for a while
but he rather lived up to his name. For the third study, I had the good
fortune to work with and to live in the domain of a wonderful man whose
contribution was invaluable. He was acknowledged in the academic book
and his name is on the cover of Lwaano Lwanyika: Tonga Book of the Earth,
the book written with Colleen Crawford Cousins for and with the Tonga
people of Omay, in the Zambezi Valley in Zimbabwe.11 There is no doubt
that an assistant can be crucial to an anthropologist’s endeavour, and a
deep collaboration can be established. One lives, in certain places, under
their protection. An assistant can, among many things, make possible
the collecting of many kinds of data; actively facilitate access to leaders,
forums and other groups; repair blunders; act as a guide through etiquette
and the rules of exchange; and shape the anthropologist’s ideas.
In two studies in South Africa, I conducted fieldwork for extended
periods directly with informants who were not paid. In a book recently
be published on one of the studies, the 14 men with whom I worked read
the manuscript and critique it. Their names are on the cover of the book
along with mine.12 This is not unproblematic. Four of the men have died
since our project ended and so they cannot sanction what I write about
them. Some have altered the views they formerly expressed about the
past and their paths have diverged. In collaborating closely I have had to
handle particular difficulties in writing about actions and experiences that
are not positive and that could even rebound to the men’s disadvantage.
In the study in the United States, I worked under the aegis of a large
medical team. Two colleagues and I completed a small qualitative project involving young women in four cities who had been diagnosed as
HIV-positive. One colleague and I interviewed women in New Orleans
over a period of about nine months. The women, who were all AfricanAmerican, were recruited by a clinic where they received treatment and
they were paid for their interviews. Some of them were very ill. We had
no assistants except a graduate student hired to conduct specific analyses
based on the data. From that study two questions arise: what marks the
difference in how we acknowledge assistants or graduate students? And
what is the difference when we acknowledge assistants or informants?
11
12
Pamela Reynolds and Colleen Crawford Cousins, Lwaano Lwanyika: Tonga Book of the
Earth (Harare: Baobab, 1991).
Pamela Reynolds, War in Worcester, Youth and the Apartheid State (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2013).
Gleanings and Leavings
313
My experience with assistants varied but was never difficult. Only in
one study could the assistant be called a collaborator. How ought I to
have acknowledged him? The design in that ethnography utilised a range
of methods that had not been used before in those combinations or for
the study of the subject under examination. Some of the methods were
devised in the field in response to situations that presented questions to
be answered. And the analysis called for a different range of skills and
for the ability to search for patterns in the data that could not have been
predicted. Collaboration in the design and the analysis was not feasible.
I began one study with a student as my assistant and, quite soon, she
became a Ph.D. scholar and then we worked alongside each other. How
should we have acknowledged the information we exchanged and drew
on in the compilation of two separate monographs? Sometimes I have
hired people and have paid them for specific pieces of work but have
found few of their research products fruitful. In fact the small projects
mostly just provided one way to offer financial support.
What are the criteria for greater acknowledgment than the usual
proffered at the beginning of publications? Criteria of indigeneity, of
belonging, of degree of education; value of remuneration; or an estimation of the quality of the contribution? Who is to judge my motivation?
Who to weigh our contributions, on what evidence? Is the issue only to
be raised in relation to works granted the status of classics, works that
will last down time? Ought protocols to be formulated to ensure justice?
Just acknowledgment implies a measure of the joint exploration and the
weighting of contributions made to the four stages in the production of
a monograph.
There are many more facets we could explore, the character of the
anthropologist, for one. Some say I am like Monica and if that is so, it is
only in having craggy looks as we age, and in being shy, socially awkward,
reticent, formal for most of our social interactions. If the description
holds for either of us, how can it be said to have affected, or affect, our
relationships in the field? Helen Vendler, writing about Seamus Heaney’s
book of poems Fieldwork (1979), says he composed them while living in
Ireland in anthropological mode (‘from the convinced will of the companioned self ’), and turned his gaze to ‘the ordinary ways life is lived,
and became able as a fieldworker to sketch psychological and cultural
transactions’.13 My query here is how far anthropologists’ characters
influence their ways of seeing and interpreting, and the extent to which
assistants may contribute to the sketch of psychological and cultural
transactions. What could constitute the evidence? Ludwig Wittgenstein
suggests that someone’s state of mind might be estimated on the basis of
13
Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 72–74.
314
Inside African Anthropology
‘evidence’. ‘But evidence here includes “imponderable evidence”’ – and
this includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone.14
Anthropologists have for a long time been accused of colonialism.
The charge rests largely on relationships in the field and the stealing of
knowledge. It is a very real issue. Is the implication that, given racial
dominance, anthropology ought not to have been undertaken like that?
How then should it have been pursued? Would joint authorship qualify
as justice? It is difficult to gauge, and hard to know who should decide,
on what terms anthropologists may cross frontiers such as race, class, age
or gender. Perhaps the accusation relies on the nature of the product. It
seems often to be made about estimates of the relationship an anthropologist has with their assistant. Is my work (supposing it worthy of close
examination) to be scrutinised for colonial bias only in respect of its ethnography – in which assistants were used? Certainly, it is much harder to
scrutinise the relationship between anthropologist and informant. In any
case, the nature of the relationship between anthropologists and assistants surely reaches beyond colonialism. It is multiplied across time and
space and political dispensations. It is current.
Monica’s work was unusual for its time in being multi-sited and
multi-layered. Her determination to attend to detail led her to make
an extraordinary contribution to knowledge. Her analysis is subtle and
wise, her evidence dependable and scrupulous. She was intrepid. She
may not have known the worth of her ethnographic text and so would
have shied away from attaching another’s name to it. In judging her
motivation we may do well to recall ‘the fundamental obscurity of lives
not our own’.15 Her work may not escape the criticisms levelled against
our anthropological ancestors, for example, the impression they often
gave of having been omniscient; of having perpetuated a sense that their
informants lived in an ethnographic present; or of having delivered synthetic descriptions. My intention here is not to make judgements but to
invite close inspection of the criteria we use in making them.
Nor am I suggesting that we foreclose the investigation into relationships between anthropologist and assistant for it is one that can be imbued
with anxiety. Rather than naming it and tying the label on to this or that
anthropologist, it may be better to stay open to the nature of the anxiety.
It is a strange relationship: it contains nervousness with regard to power,
meaning and history (particularly in the account of inequality and differences in language). It is an intense relationship and yet it is one that ends,
at least in the form that it takes around a specific project. The anthropologist has a greater investment in it although the assistant may also benefit
14
15
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1963 [1953], 228.
Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 85.
Gleanings and Leavings
315
from the opportunities it provides (access to work with local government
or NGOs, for example, or the acquisition of new skills). These interests
are not often articulated, I suspect, and nor are the tensions that may
build over time. As the end of the project approaches a withdrawal may
occur. The issue at the heart of it all is a mystery, for this is a tie unlike
any other. It is bounded, yet monetary exchange does not determine its
form or rid the relationship of intricate reverberations. Anxiety need not
preclude or dominate its quality, mutuality or enjoyment.
Anthropology has changed. Few now design projects that resemble
the classic, all-encompassing form of old. Reaction to Conquest: Effects of
Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (1936) is recognised as
a classic and in 2008 it was reissued by the International Africa Institute
in their series ‘Classics in Anthropology’.16 In discussing what guidelines
to offer the writers of introductions to individual volumes in the series,
Murray Last (in a personal communication) suggested that a classic has
three parallel ‘lives’. The first is the book itself – its ideas and arguments,
the innovations it set in motion, the way it reflected current concerns,
and so on. The second ‘life’ is that of the author – who she was, her
subsequent career, and references to what else she wrote. The third ‘life’
is that of the people who were studied both in real life and in the more
fictive life of anthropology or film.
I would suggest that Monica’s writing on the Pondo is a vital part of the
historical record of the Eastern Cape, an area from which many leaders –
including the most famous one – of the fight to install democracy in
South Africa have come. This region has a very complicated history and
has become a place of terrible poverty. An older elite has used the book
as a reliable resource in the description of the past. Perhaps current
critiques of Monica reveal the nervousness of the postcolonial period.
Questions can be raised as to how South Africans recognise a canon in
anthropology, how they claim a founding knowledge and hence can value
a continuing tradition in the discipline.
Part Two
Remembering Monica
Monica was a formidable figure. On the dot of eight in the morning
she would glide into the lecture hall of the Old Arts Building at the
University of Cape Town with her black gown flapping ominously. Her
stern demeanour silenced us all, even the newspaper readers at the back.
As a first-year student I was mesmerised by her absorption in her subject.
I watched her mouth – she spoke more from one side of it than the other
16
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest.
316
Inside African Anthropology
Figure 10.1. Monica Wilson at Hunterstoun in the years of her retirement.17
as she formed her well-crafted sentences – and I was fascinated by the
clarity and confidence of her exposition. There was no obvious attempt to
entertain and little interaction with us. She presented her political views,
imbued as they were in her topic, without prevarication or apology. Her
scientifically objective account of race was formative in my understanding
of the world for it revealed the rickety structures on which ideologies are
so often founded. Her 1965 talk in Jameson Hall in defence of Jack
Simons was just as impressive.18
One did not, in those days, speak to professors, or at least I did not, and
it was only as a friend of her son Francis and daughter-in-law Lindy that
I came to know her in the late 1960s and stay with her in Hunterstoun,
her home in the Hogsback. In 1979, having been away from Africa for
11 years, in the United States, India and Britain, I returned as a Cambridge graduate student to do fieldwork with children in Crossroads,
then a beleaguered informal settlement, and Monica generously agreed
17
18
WC, N1 Photographs of Monica Wilson.
For details about this speech on Simons and academic freedom see Francis Wilson, ‘An
Appreciation’, 20.
Gleanings and Leavings
317
to be my supervisor despite having retired. Twice I stayed with her in
Hunterstoun and we overcame our mutual shyness to enjoy long walks
and hours of talk, mostly about books. I recall, in particular, the pleasure
of Sunday evenings when she would make omelettes for us and we would
eat them and drink wine beside the fire as we talked.
Monica was the first woman to impress me with her stature and her
deep, unquestioned involvement in the pursuit of knowledge for itself and
for her recognition of the potential power inherent in it. It was startling
for me to meet someone so convinced of the value of studying people’s
everyday lives; of granting the importance of their history, albeit not one
of kings and castles and crusades; of tracing the force in ideas like those to
do with witchcraft; and of documenting the devastation being wrought by
the imposition of different ways of being – different economic, political,
social and moral ideas accompanied by the irresistible force of foreign
finance, arms, ideologies and the will to dominate.
My initial research on children in southern Africa built on her ethnography of the Pondo. All my work has been influenced by the value
she placed on the forms of life that people design for themselves and
the depth of meaning that lies in what people say, how they move, their
use of space, their cognizance of time, and the way their interactions are
shaped by ethical considerations. I have taken from her the courage to
work wherever one chooses and to get there by any means – at the age
of 23 she rode across Pondoland on horseback. I have taken from her
the will to pursue academic interests even at dinner tables and the cognizance of the rigour necessary in fieldwork, for everything impinges on
the core subject of one’s interest. Monica is famous for the emphasis she
placed on the massing of minute details and the search for the pattern
in things. Let me give one example: with Monica in mind, I knew that
to study the labour of a child on a field in the Zambezi Valley I would
necessarily have to discover the field’s history, ownership, size, quality
of soil, level of destruction by elephants, distance from water, effects of
fertiliser, the amount of labour it demands across the seasons, and the
number of baskets of millet it yields. The accumulation of detail can,
now, lead to accusations of being old-fashioned; the riposte is to ask how
sound the analysis can be without it.
One thing I can confirm is that she was a tough supervisor. While
conducting fieldwork for my dissertation in the Crossroads informal
settlement,19 I invited Monica and the mothers of the children with
whom I was working to a party in my room at the back of a shack. We
19
Pamela Reynolds, ‘Children of Crossroads: An Ethnographic Study of Cognition among
Seven-year-old Xhosa Children in an Urban Environment’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of
Cape Town, 1983), later amended and published as Childhood in Crossroads: Cognition
and Society in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
318
Inside African Anthropology
had a grand time and afterwards I asked Monica, ‘How will I know that
I have enough data to leave the field?’ She drew herself up and said with
firm Oxbridge enunciation, ‘When there are no further contradictions in
your material.’
There was no timidity in what she set out to do: ‘My object is firstly to
describe life as it is in Pondoland today.’ Nor was she timid as, in the years
between 1931 and 1933, she rode her horse across the famous ‘crowd
of little hills’ when doing fieldwork among the Pondo.20 What spirit,
what confidence, what mastery to write in one’s twenties an ethnography
of a people. (Yet she told me of her sense of inadequacy as she grew
older.) Her ambition was to reach beyond description to analysis. She
joined in with as many activities and discussions as possible in order
to describe things as they were in the 1930s and as they were recalled
as having been; and to place the ideal beside the practice. She would
describe a custom or an institution as she saw it working and as it was
described by ‘the ancients’, and then discuss modifications. She gave
special attention to the effect of contact with other groups and how this
influenced social cohesion and the sanctions that regulate society. She
took pride in checking every piece of information or description. One
inquiry led to another and another, until patterns formed and she could
weave them into a monograph. Monica integrated a wealth of material
in her book. In talking about her time in the field she said that her work
on the Pondo was fine but that her work on the farms and the towns was
not a success; it had been too brief, too light. She added that it is hard
to study in cities.
I was asked to write about Monica’s effect on my work. What amuses
me right now is that she would never have passed the scrutiny of present
funders or the inspection of the current thought-police who man the
barricades of ethics boards. They might say:
‘Your object is to describe the life of the Pondo? You need a clear and
well-defined research question, derived from and justified in the context of
a particular body of anthropological theory.’
‘You want to analyse change? Your research design must be developed to
provide robust answers to research questions. You must give evidence of
the feasibility of the study and its potential contribution to anthropological
theory.’
‘Every interlocutor, even a five-year old, must sign a consent form.’
These responses come from recent rejection letters I have received.
It is the vital importance of evidence that Monica taught me to keep in
mind always. On what basis can one claim to know something? Monica’s
method was to crosshatch: she engraved with an intersecting series of
20
Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 15.
Gleanings and Leavings
319
Figure 10.2. Monica Wilson on a hike during her retirement, with the Hogsback
in the background. She died peacefully on 26 October 1982 after a long battle
with cancer.21
lines that covered and checked the terrain. Mine is more to draw with
a compass: with a child or a youth at the centre I attempt to ‘go round;
hem in; grasp mentally; accomplish’22 to cover the experiences that radiate from the centre and that are drawn in to affect it. Beyond her method,
though, what stays with me always is her unapologetic fascination with
anthropology and the indubitable foundation of her work in an understanding of the political injustice and devastation done to the people in
South Africa.
21
22
WC, N1 Photographs of Monica Wilson. Reproduced with permission from Francis
and Tim Wilson.
Definition of ‘compass’ in D. Thomson, ed., Concise Oxford English Dictionary of Current
English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 9th edition).
Bibliography
Archival Sources
BC 880 MONICA AND GODFREY WILSON PAPERS [WILSON COLLECTION, WC], UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN LIBRARIES, MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT
A. Catalogued materials
As listed in Lesley Hart BC880 Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers: An Index
compiled by Lesley Hart (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries,
1999) [Wilson Collection]
http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/index.php?html=/mss/newaids/BC880.HTM&mss
collid=261
A Personal Papers
A1 Godfrey Wilson
A1.5 Diary, 1934–1935
A1.11 Budget of field expenses
A1.14 Papers re Godfrey Wilson’s Death, 1944
A2 Monica Wilson
A2.2 Pocket diaries, 1927–1930, 1935, 1947–1973, 1979–1980
A2.4 Address Book
A2.5 School history book, 1925
A2.6 School reports, 1919–1924
A2.7 Certificate: Synod’s Examination in Religious Knowledge, 1919
A2.8 Presbyterian minister’s statement of Monica Wilson’s fitness to join congregation, 1926
A2.9 School and university accounts
A2.10 Wedding invitation to Monica and Godfrey’s wedding, 1935
A2.12 Prescription for spectacles, 1938
A2.13 Funeral service for Monica Wilson, 1982
A2.14 Family tree
A2.15 Notes: Anthropology in South Africa, recorded for Jom [sic] Fox, Behavioral Sciences Centre, April 1972
A2.16 Reports on overseas visits and special leave
A2.17 Notes on anthropological work
A2.22 Customs forms:
r requesting permission to export Corona typewriter, 6.12.1932
321
322
Bibliography
r requesting permission to export HMV portable gramophone and records,
2.3.1935
B Correspondence
B1 Letters from Monica Wilson to Godfrey Wilson, 15.02.1934–1944
B2 Letters from Godfrey Wilson to Monica Wilson, 30.06.1930–14.05.1944
B4 Letters from Godrey Wilson (mostly personal and with fellow anthropologists)
B4.4 GW to and from Bronislaw Malinowski, MSS & TSS, 22.11.1934–
11.11.1938
B4.6 To and from Dr J H Oldham, TSS, 17.01.1936–22.06.1939 (both personal
and in his position as Administrative Director of the African Institute)
B4.7 To and from Audrey Richards, MSS & TSS, 27.03.1931–07.07.1941
B4.10 Correspondence with others in chronological order, MS & TSS, 1935–
1943
B4.11 Correspondence with and re: Rhodes Livingstone Institute, 14.10.1938–
(Includes letter from Bruno Malinowski and letters from Max Gluckman)
B4.12 Correspondence re: application to Rhodes University for Chair in Sociology, 23.12.1941–25.10.1941
B4.13 Correspondence (of GW and MW) with Makerere College, Uganda,
23.12.1943–12.10.1944
B4.14 Correspondence with the Rockefeller Foundation, 06.06.1934–
24.02.1938
B5 MW: Family correspondence
B5.1 Letters MW to her father (David Hunter), 24.08.1918–19.04.1944
and letters from DAH to MW, 31.10.1937–25.03.1949
B5.2 From MW to her mother (Jessie Hunter), 01.11.1931, 1947–1948
B5.6 Correspondence with Prof & Mrs John Dover Wilson, 18.10.1936–
21.07.1946
B6 [MW] Correspondence with others
B6.4 To and from Bice Crighton[sic]-Miller, 12.01.1973–25.04.1978
B6.5 To and from E E Evans-Pritchard, MSS & TSS, 04.06.1946–09.07.1946
B6.6 From Max Gluckman, TSS, 15.08.1942–15.01.1947
B6.13 To and from A R Radcliffe-Brown, 10.08.1946–1952
B6.14 To and from Audrey Richards, 28.08.1940–15.02.1982
B6.15 From E R Roux, 05.11.1928–05.12.1931
B6.16 From Isaac Schapera, MSS, 26.07.1938–01.11.1976
B6.20 Miscellaneous single letters
B12 Correspondence with Botswana Society about lecture, 1969. Includes letter
from Frieda Matthews and MW’s reply
B13 Correspondence with Rhodes University re: Honorary degree, 1969–1970
C Godfrey Wilson: Writings and Talks
C1 Malinowski seminars: notes on/papers prepared for
Seminar paper read at the London School of Economics, 19.10.1933
Ten elements of social life: a suggested guide in the field. TSS. [Paper prepared
for Bruno Malinowski seminar, 17.06.1936]
The nature of an institution. MSS
C4 Writings on religion (Includes material on the Nyakyusa).
Bibliography
323
D Nyakyusa Research
D1 Godfrey Wilson’s notebooks
D1.1 GW’s notebooks 1–79 (no. 12 missing)
Index (incomplete)
D1.2 John Mwaikombo [sic] notebooks J1-J20
D1.3 Leonard Mwaisumo notebooks L1-L7
D1.4 T Mwanjin notebook
D2 Folders of Age-villages
The headings are those used by MW in labelling the folders
D3 Folders on Communal Rituals
D4 Missions/Christian influences
D5 Kinship/Family
D6 Other topics
D6.2 Songs and folktales. Copied by MW, GW and clerk
D6.3 Tradition
Notes by clerk L
D6.4 Race relations
MW’s notes
D6.5 Earning money
MW’s notes
Also notes by one of clerks
D6.7 The Lupa
100 point questionnaire/survey form on the Lupa, compiled by GW
Answers to some of the questions
D7 Ngonde Research
D8 MW’s and GW’s writing on the Nyakyusa
D8.4 MS of GW’s book on Nyakyusa society
D10 Letters to GW, mostly in Nyakyusa, 1933–39
Including from John Brown Mwaikombo [sic], Timothy Mwanjisi, W Ambilikile Mwaisemba and T L Mwaisumo
D11 Correspondence with the International Institute of African Languages and
Cultures including reports from the field, 1935–1939
D12 Photographs
E Broken Hill Research
F The Analysis of Social Change
F1 Notes and drafts, MSS and TSS
F2 Letters of congratulations, 1945–1949, including from A R Radcliffe-Brown
and Alfred Zimmern
F3 Reviews
G Monica Wilson: Student Notes and Essays
G1 Student essays, 1930, with comments by T C Hodson
G2 Notes by MW, probably made while a student (2 folders)
324
Bibliography
H Eastern Cape Research
H1 Reaction to Conquest
H1.1 Early drafts, notes. Request slips for British Library Reading Room.
H1.2 Letters received after publication, 1936–1938
H1.3 Reviews
H2 Research in Auckland, Victoria East District
H2.1 Sketches of clothing ornamentation, tobacco bags, basketwork, etc.
Family trees
H2.2 Fieldnotes, draft, TSS
H2.3 Notes, in Xhosa [by assistant?]
H4 Keiskama [sic] Hoek Rural Survey
J University of Cape Town
J1 Social Anthropology Department: administration
J2 Social Anthropology Department: students
J3 Examinations
Correspondence with external examiners, copies of exam papers, 1953–
1970
J4 Reading lists and course programmes, 1953–1973
J5 Lecture notes
[Includes some lectures she would have been given at the University of Fort Hare
and Rhodes University]
J6 Open Universities
J6.1, Papers concerning Academic Freedom Committee and Open Universities,
1956–1966
J13 Other
J13.3 Mafeje, Archie: The Role of the bard in a contemporary African community
(offprint from Journal of African Languages, 6, 3 (1967).
MSS notes by Archie Mafeje on Townsmen or Tribesmen by P Mayer
K Langa
K1 Correspondence
K1.1 Correspondence re: Research into African Communities in the Western Cape,
1950–1962
K1.2 Correspondence with Archie Mafeje re research, 1960–1961
K1.4 Comments on TSS by D Hobart-Houghton and Francis Wilson
K2 Interviews
K2.1 Interviews (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott) with churches, 1955–1956
K2.2 Interviews with sports clubs (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott), 1955–
1956
K2.3 Interviews with clubs (mainly music) (conducted by Dr Crosse-Upcott),
1955–1956
K2.4 Other Interviews, including re Township affairs, tribal chiefs (conducted
by Dr Crosse-Upcott), 1955–1956
K2.5 Notes made by Dr Crosse-Upcott and memos from MW to C-U
K3 Interviews and notes by Archie Mafeje
(7 folders)
Includes notes to and from MW
Bibliography
325
K4 Notes made by Monica Wilson
(4 folders)
Notes made by Monica Wilson, with questions to ask researchers, including
notes re churches, clubs and societies, demographic profiles
K6 TSS of chapters or articles on Africans in Cape Town
K7 Social harmony and discord in an urban location TSS
K8 Langa Early drafts
L Monica Wilson’s Writings and Talks
L2 Lectures
L2.1 Apologia: special lecture to UCT students about personal faith and anthropology
L2.2 Lecture on ritual and symbolism to the Kolbe Society, 1956.
N Photographs
N1 Photographs of Monica Wilson
N2 Photographs of Monica Wilson in groups
N3 Photographs of Godfrey Wilson
N4 Photographs of GW and MW and family
N7 Unidentified photographs
David and Jessie Hunter Papers
[Hunter Collection (HP)]
AA PERSONAL
AA1 Diaries
AA1.1 Pocket diaries, 1890–1893, 1895, 1898–1948
AA1.4 Travel diaries
Norway 1871
Cruise of the yacht ‘Osprey’, 1889
Victoria Falls 1904
AA2 Accounts of travels
AA6 Notebook containing notes of thoughts on spiritual matters
AA8 School certificates from Glasgow Academy, 1878–1880
AA10 Agreement of employment of David Hunter in Croggon & Co Ltd, London, 1886
AA11 Copy of minutes relating to the ordination to the eldership of Mr David
Alexander
Hunter 1895
AA22 Newspaper cuttings of the announcement of the marriage of Monica and
Godfrey Wilson, 1935, and of the birth of Francis Wilson, 1939
AA24 Religious tracts: notes for sermons by DAH etc.
BB Correspondence
BB2 Letters from David Hunter to Jessie Hunter, 1900–1930
BB3 Letters from Jessie Hunter to David Hunter 1900–1940 & some undated
326
Bibliography
BB4 David Hunter: letters of introduction, 1881; 1885; 1893
BB5 Letters from James Stewart to David Hunter, 1893–1902
BB6 David Hunter’s correspondence, 1887–1947
DD Lovedale and Missionary Work
DD1 David Hunter’s writing of Lovedale and mission work
DD1.1 Report on tour of mission stations in South Africa, TSS, 10.10.1895
DD1.2 Report on a day’s activities at Lovedale, TSS
DD1.3 Two rounds of the clock at Lovedale, offprint
DD1.4 Recollections of a meeting of the Lovedale Literary Society
DD1.7 The Story of the Lovedale Hospital, MSS
DD1.8 The Mission field: the story of Lovedale II, TSS
DD3 United Free Church of Scotland
DD4 Education and teaching of crafts
DD6 South African Outlook
EE Photographs
EE2–EE3 Family photograph albums
EE6 Photographs of David and Jessie Hunter and children
EE7 Photographs sent by Monica Wilson (Hunter) to her parents, mostly of
university in England (annotated by Monica)
EE8 Photographs of Monica and family
EE11 Photographs of Lovedale and Alice
EE12 Photographs of African scenes
EE14 Packets of assorted photographs, mostly unidentified
B. Uncatalogued materials
CD: Monica Wilson interviewed by Francis and Lindy Wilson, Hogsback, Eastern Cape,
‘Childhood’, 10 Jan. 1979
‘Pondoland’, July 1979
‘Bunyakyusa’, 4 Jan. 1982
CD: ‘Archie Mafeje Panel Discussion’: Anthropology Southern Africa Conference, East London, 10 September 2010, Stanley Baluku video recording
uncat. corr., John Dover Wilson
uncat. corr., Correspondence re Z.K. Matthews Biography
uncat. corr., Isaac Schapera
uncat. corr., Gaositwe Chiepe
uncat. corr., L. Mqotsi
uncat. corr., Max Gluckman
uncat. corr., Godfrey Pitje
uncat. corr., J.D. Rheinallt Jones
uncat. corr., Solomon Skosana
uncat. corr., Colin Murray
uncat. corr., Fort Hare Council
uncat. corr., Frieda Matthews
uncat. corr., Aelred Stubbs
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327
uncat. corr., Federal Theological Seminary
uncat. corr., Livingstone Mqotsi
uncat. corr., Archie Mafeje, 1960–1979 (includes some corr. with family
members)
uncat. corr., Monica Wilson/Archie Mafeje
uncat. corr., Robin Crosse-Upcott
uncat. corr., Notes for ‘Reflections on Fieldwork’
uncat. corr., Schreuder
uncat. corr., Martin West
uncat. corr., David Philip
uncat. corr., David Philip re Z.K. Biography
uncat. corr., George Murdock
uncat. corr., Leonard Thompson
uncat. corr., Oxford History: Corr
uncat. corr., Desmond Clark
uncat. corr., George Park
uncat. corr., Oxford History Reprint
uncat. corr., Muriel Bradbrook
uncat. corr., Elizabeth Colson
uncat. corr., Jeff Guy
uncat. corr., Hugh Montefiore
uncat. material, Lectures, Third Theological Staff Institute, 1965
uncat. material, Analysis of Social Change: Business
uncat. material, Files on Various Subjects Bo–Bu
uncat. material, Occasional Papers: Talks and Addresses, 1967–69
Additions, Information Files (partly cat.), Migrant Labour
Files on Various Subjects, L–N (partly cat.), Migrant Labour
Occasional Papers, Social Change (uncat.)
Other Archival Collections: United Kingdom
London, Archives and Rare Books Division, London School of Economics
Audrey Richards Papers
Girton College Archive, Cambridge
Memories of Muriel Bradbrook on tape (with a transcript), compiled during the
1980s as part of the series entitled ‘Strong-minded Dons’
Other Archival Collections: United States
Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library
The Papers of Hilda Kuper (1911–1992)
Other Archival Collections: South Africa
AU8HOE Winifred Hoernlé Papers (Witwatersrand University, University
Archive)
A1419 Ellen Hellmann Papers (Witwatersrand University, William Cullen
Papers)
The Jack and Eileen Krige Papers (Killie Campbell Library, Durban)
1/NQL, vol. 50, file 2/3/2(11)
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University of Fort Hare Student Files (University of Fort Hare, Alice)
Interviews
Andrew Bank
Interview with Dumisani Mbube, Ntibane, 14 March 2007 (with Leslie J. Bank).
Telephonic interview with Archie Nkonyeni, Cape Town/East London, 4 December 2008.
Interview with Lesley Hart, Cape Town, 21 January 2010.
Telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, Cape Town/Cofimvaba, 6 June
2010.
Interview with Ganief Hendricks, Cape Town, 12 June 2010.
Telephonic interview with Nomfundo Mafeje, Cape Town/Cofimvaba, 15 June
2010.
Interview with Margaret Green, Cape Town, 21 June 2010.
Telephonic interview with Fikile Bam, Cape Town/Johannesburg, 9 July 2010.
Leslie J. Bank
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 15 September 2008.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 28 September 2008.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 October 2008.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 4 November 2008.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, 26 January 2009.
Seán Morrow
Telephonic interview with Professor Elizabeth Colson, 19 November 2006.
Interview with Joe Matthews, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 20 November 2006.
Interview with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, Gaborone, 2 December 2006.
Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, East London, 14 June 2007.
Interview with John and Jean Comaroff, Cape Town, 4 September 2007.
Interview with Neville Alexander, Cape Town, 3 March 2008.
Interview with Francis Wilson, Cape Town, 7 March 2008.
Interview with Professor Joanne Tyler, Hogsback, 16 August 2008.
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Index
African National Congress (ANC), 81, 97,
235, 250–1
ANC Youth League, 102–3, 123, 204,
208–9, 235, 238
Defiance Campaign, 123, 237
African research assistants, 14–17, 25,
67–9, 164–5, 308, 310–11
insider-outsider status, 6, 22–3, 165,
226–7
motivation, 69, 93–4, 226–7
see also names of individual research
assistants, e.g. Mqotsi,
Livingstone
African Studies
article by Mqotsi, 208, 224–5, 233
articles by Pitje, 210
review of Langa, 256
Africanizing Anthropology, 13–15
Alexander, Neville, 24, 295
Alidi, 145, 149–50, 169–70, 176, 178
All African Convention, 204, 226, 241
Anthony Wilkin Scholarship, 63, 70
anthropological theory, 1–2, 11–12, 25
colonialism, 6, 14, 67, 314
functionalism, 1–2, 6, 11–12, 61, 287
insider-outsider dichotomy, 6, 22–3,
165, 226–7
anthropology, 4, 10–17, 95–6, 139, 310
co-production of knowledge, 14, 23, 25,
68, 254–5
fieldwork styles, 14, 20, 23, 61, 67–8,
255
role of personal background, 12–13,
37, 255, 263, 271–2
fieldwriting, 12, 18, 95, 98–9, 108, 112,
118, 121, 157–8
male dominance, 7, 10, 12
‘official history’ of (South Africa), 7, 10,
12
‘unofficial history’ of (Southern and
Central Africa), 12–17
women in, 10, 13, 60–1, 142
see also African research assistants;
interpreters/research assistants
apartheid, 4, 12, 249, 291–2
Bantu Education, 224, 241
black academic advancement, 224–5,
227
Argyle, Mr and Mrs, 71
Auckland Village, 18, 70–2, 90, 93
Bam, Fikile, 5, 266–7, 276, 278
Bates, George Latimer, 16, 69
Beinart, William, 73, 80–1, 100–2
Bokwe, Frieda see Matthews, Frieda (née
Bokwe)
Bokwe, John Knox, 7, 197, 303–4
Bokwe, Rosebery, 52–3
Bourdieu, Pierre, 25, 309
Bradbrook, Muriel, 4, 48, 301
Brutus, Denis, 206, 229
Bundy, Colin, 80–1, 100–2
Bunyakyusa, 6, 14, 95, 133–4, 140, 143–7,
154, 160–2, 172, 177–8, 285,
301
‘age villages’, 136–7
case studies, 159
Godfrey as co-author, 1, 24, 130, 135–8,
156
Godfrey as co-worker, 14, 19–21, 31,
95, 129, 134, 143
different fieldwork styles, 20, 133,
138–40, 142–3, 147–8, 150–5,
188
different relations with informants,
132–3, 140, 142, 148
‘gendered’ division of labour, 130,
134, 138, 148
Monica having malaria, 134, 144–5
Mwaisumo,
as Godfrey’s research assistant, 131–2,
150–1, 165–6, 168–74, 181, 184,
187, 189
as Monica’s clerk, 14, 20–1, 142,
145–6, 148, 154–5, 165–6,
173–4, 177–81, 184, 187, 189
publications on, 1, 3, 19–21, 24, 30,
129, 133–6, 156, 174, 260
347
348
Index
Bunyakyusa (cont.)
writing up and publishing both of their
notes, 130–2, 138–9, 155–60
research assistants
notes by, 159, 181–3
relationships with, 5, 38, 227, 260
women, 148–9
Burkitt, Miles Crawford, 63
Cambridge, 49, 51, 274
Monica on Indian men, 51–2
see also Girton College
Cape African Teachers’ Association
(CATA), 225, 241, 243
Charsley, Simon, 298–9
Chiepe, Gaositwe, 199, 203–6
Clark, Desmond and Mary, 194, 303
Clifford, James, 91, 95, 98
different forms of field-writing, 19,
98–9, 112, 118
significance of using a typewriter, 105,
158
Collegiate Girls’ High School, 27, 38,
45–6, 66
Colson, Elizabeth, 8, 13, 197
Comaroff, John and Jean, 5, 8, 120, 165,
202
Cory, George, 45, 285
Coryndon, Sir Robert Thorne, 59–60
Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR), 241–2
Crosse-Upcott, A.R.W. (Robin), 23,
255–6, 260–3, 266, 268, 271,
274, 278
Cousins, Colleen Crawford, 312
David and Jessie Hunter Papers, 27, 30, 32
De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 302
Dent, Clifford, 204, 214
dreams, 19, 117–21, 182, 184
collected by Monica, 118–23, 125–6
Dreyer, Mary Agnes Buchanan (née Soga),
73, 75–80, 89, 92–4
Dreyer, Theodore Frederick, 73, 75,
78–79
Driberg, Jack Herbert, 38, 59–62, 70, 139,
147, 285
East Bank, 18–19, 81–3, 90, 95, 97,
99–101, 106–10, 124, 227
desire for money, 110–11, 115, 125
gaps in material, 99–100, 108–10,
113–15, 118
interpreter, 100, 111, 126
and Kadalie, 18, 82, 90, 103
on ‘Kadalie’s Strike’, 81, 102, 106,
108
survival of magical beliefs, 119–20
urban social change, 98, 110–13,
115–17, 124–6
women, 115–16
youth, 117
East London, 100–1, 103, 110, 123
IICU active in, 81, 91, 98, 102
Eiselen, Werner, 12, 211, 241
Ellison, James, 173, 181–2
Erikson, Erik, 302
Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 148, 201–2, 289
Fabian, Johannes, 149
Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem),
221
Fort Hare Native College, 5, 52–3, 62,
193–5, 197–8, 203–4, 223, 225,
227, 230, 251, 264, 266, 285
ANC Youth League at, 204, 208–9, 235
Monica
as lecturer, 5, 7, 21, 155–6, 158, 193,
195, 197–200, 203–4, 218–20,
227, 231–4, 284–5
as warden of Elukhanyisweni, 197–8,
204–5, 218–19, 222–3
giving evidence to Fagan
Commission, 220, 223
maintaining links after leaving, 221–2
Foucault, Michel, 310
Freeman, Gwendolen, 48, 51
Freud, Sigmund, 119, 311
Galbraith, John, 292, 294
Gavin, Rev. William, 73
Geza, Michael, 84–9, 91–3, 179
Girton College, 4, 17, 25, 34, 38, 46, 65,
139
Monica
as undergraduate, 4, 24, 34, 38,
46–50, 55–6, 64, 65, 71, 96
changing from history to social
anthropology, 17, 38, 59, 62, 66,
284–5
and Driberg, 59–62
friendship with Roux, 54–9
friendship with Sadek, 38, 52–3
as doctoral student, 17, 38, 64, 76–7,
85, 91–3, 118
see also Labour Study Circle
Gluckman, Max, 1–2, 4–5, 11–12, 120,
138, 194, 201–2, 289
as director of RLI, 212–13
correspondence with Monica, 213–14,
217, 219
Godlo, R.H., 82, 90, 101
Goldthorpe, J.E., 288
Green, Margaret, 266
Hall, Kenneth, 302
Index
Hammond-Tooke, David, 10, 19–20, 130,
157, 259
Hani, Chris, 226, 251
Harries, Patrick, 8, 68
Hart, Lesley, 30
Healdtown, 144, 239–41, 246, 259, 264
healers, 235–7, 239, 245–8, 252
Heaney, Seamus, 308, 313
Hellmann, Ellen, 4, 13, 18, 96, 116–17,
124, 294
Hendricks, Ganief, 272
Hertzog, J.B.M., 44, 80, 88
Hodson, Thomas Callan, 62, 70–1, 88
influence on Monica, 17, 38, 62–4, 66,
71, 139, 147, 159
Hoernlé, Winifred Tucker, 11, 13, 31, 34,
89
letters from Monica, 87, 178, 180
Honono, Nathaniel, 241, 243, 259
Houghton, Kenneth Hobart, 73, 87, 200
Howarth, Jane, 49
Hunter, Aylmer (brother), 41
Hunter, David (father), 39–40, 44, 65,
70–1, 77, 82–5, 88, 97–8, 200,
303–4
Monica
correspondence with, 27, 32, 45–7,
55–7, 62, 140, 156, 158, 186
influence on, 27, 38–42, 47, 64–5,
105
networks, 42, 44–5, 82, 98, 103–4, 197,
304
Hunter, Jessie (née McGregor), 39–41, 43,
46, 65, 77, 200
correspondence with Monica, 33, 78,
80
Hunter, Monica see Wilson, Monica (née
Hunter)
Hunterstoun (Hogsback), 28, 41, 80, 200
conference, 6–7, 64, 225
Monica
living in cottage in grounds, 198–9
retiring to, 25, 28, 306, 316–17
Iliffe, John, 301
Independent Industrial and Commercial
Workers’ Union (IICU), 18,
80–1, 83, 90, 98, 101–3, 106
Industrial and Commercial Workers’
Union (ICU), 54, 56–7, 80–101
International African Institute (IAI),
141–2, 162, 178
interpreters/research assistants, 7–11, 14,
25, 308
acknowledgement of contributions, 16,
69, 91, 308, 311–13
Africans as, 14–17, 25, 67–9, 164–5,
226–7, 308, 310–11
349
in colonial administration, 15–16,
163, 187
insider-outsider status, 6, 22–3, 165,
226–7
motivation, 69, 93–4, 226–7
missionaries as, 8, 11, 298, 308
relationships with anthropologists,
311–15
see also names of individual interpreters,
e.g. Pitje, Godfrey
Jacobs, Nancy J., 16–17, 69, 90
Jeffreys, Mervyn, 209, 244–6
Jones, Mary Gwladys, 46, 50, 62, 284
Jordan, A.C., 2, 217, 241, 275
Junod, Henri Alexandre, 8, 44, 68, 89, 91
Kabiki, 145, 147, 149–50, 176, 186–7
Kadalie, Clements, 18, 80–2, 90, 93, 98,
101–3
Kasitile, 21, 132, 144, 147, 152, 173–4
Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, 31, 95,
203, 217, 260, 275
Kerr, Alexander, 195, 197, 201, 208, 218,
239
Kgosana, Philip, 264
Krige, Eileen, 4, 13, 18, 31, 211, 248
Krige, Jack, 4, 31, 211, 248
Kuper, Hilda, 4, 13, 31, 202, 209, 292,
294
Labour Study Circle, 17, 38, 55–7, 98
Lamphere, Louise, 12–13
Langa, 6, 23, 95, 125, 203, 262–3, 265–6,
272, 279
fieldwork by
Crosse-Upcott, 256, 260, 262–3, 266,
268, 271, 274, 278
Hammond-Tooke, 259
Mafeje, 23–4, 95, 125, 226, 253–6,
258–9, 263–74, 277–8
Simons, 259–60, 277, 291
Last, Murray, 315
Laws, Hester, 62
Leach, Edmund, 37, 39, 65
Levine, Roger, 15, 163–4
Levinson, Deirdre, 266
Leys, Norman, 57
Libombo, Elias (Spoon), 68
Limba Separatist Church, 225, 228–9,
230–2, 247, 251–2
Lovedale Missionary Institution, 4, 7, 43,
52–3, 70–1
liberal Christian tradition, 4, 38, 47, 64,
116, 140, 142, 203
religious and social networks, 42, 82, 98,
103–4, 193
school, 4, 17, 24, 38, 43–5, 66, 77, 304
350
Index
Macmillan, Hugh, 39
Macmillan, W.M., 88, 197, 285–6
Mafeje, Archibald Boyce Monwabisi
(Archie), 5, 37, 224, 226, 253,
257, 259, 263, 267
school career, 259–60, 272
as student at Fort Hare, 260–1
as student at UCT, 254, 258, 263–4,
266, 273, 276, 278
academic career, 244, 253
fieldwork in Langa, 23–4, 95, 125, 226,
253–6, 258–9, 264, 268–71, 274,
277
authorship of Langa, 226, 255, 257–8
influence of background, 271–2, 278
as insider, 254, 263–7, 269–70,
272–3, 278–9
report on, 268–73, 275, 277
style, 23–4, 271, 278
Monica
correspondence with, 33, 255, 258,
267, 270, 278, 284
on, 257
relationship with, 6, 23–4, 37, 209,
226, 253–5, 258, 268, 270–1,
274–8, 294
as Non-European Unity Movement
activist, 254, 259, 264, 276
obituaries, 253, 258
parents, 259, 263–4, 271
Mafeje, Bennett, 259, 263, 271
Magubane, Bernard (Ben), 224, 226, 251,
297
Mair, Lucy, 211–12, 288
Majombozi, Guston and Miriam, 228–9,
233
Major, Helen, 47
Maki, Theresa, 260
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2, 10–11, 39,
60–1, 66, 70, 88, 91, 119, 139,
147–9, 159, 287–9, 310
praise for Godfrey, 139–40
reaction to Reaction to Conquest, 88,
287
Mandela, Nelson, 24, 237, 295
Maqoma, Janet, 44, 284
Masinyane, Pauline, 204–5
Matthews, Frieda (née Bokwe), 44, 197,
221–2, 302–4
Matthews, Joe, 197, 199, 218
Matthews, Zachariah Keodirelang (Z.K.),
28, 44, 195, 197, 199, 204, 206,
209, 217, 220–2
Monica working on his autobiography,
203, 222–3, 302–5
and Mqotsi, 236, 241–2
Mqotsi on, 207, 236, 238
Pitje on, 208
Mayer, Iona, 96, 98, 102–3, 110, 112,
125, 257, 279
Mayer, Philip, 12, 102–3, 110, 112, 125,
243, 257, 279, 294
and Mqotsi, 243–4
role of Jewish identity on work, 37
Townsmen or Tribesmen, 110, 269, 279
‘Xhosa in Town’ trilogy, 95–6, 98, 112
Mayekiso, Mac, 266, 278
Mbembe, Achilles, 29
Mbilini, Peggy, 44
Mbube, Dumisani, 79
McGregor, Jessie see Hunter, Jessie (née
McGregor)
Mdala, Kenneth, 15, 17, 163, 181, 185
Meikle, Mary Agnes see Soga, Mary Agnes
(née Meikle)
Middledrift, 6
fieldwork by Burkitt, 63
fieldwork by Mqotsi, 22–3, 225, 227,
235–7, 239, 244–6, 248, 251–2
Mitchell, Clyde, 11–12, 213
Monica Wilson Centenary Conference
(2008), 6–7, 64, 225
Mqotsi, Livingstone, 22, 206, 208, 224–6,
228–31, 235, 237–8, 241, 252
as pupil at Paterson Technical High
School, 206, 208, 229–31
as student at Fort Hare, 206–7, 224–5,
230–5, 239
on staff of Healdtown Training School,
240–1
CSIR fiasco, 241–2
and position at Rhodes, 243–4, 249
as newspaper editor, 250, 252
banning and exile, 250–1
academic development, 225–6, 230–40,
244–51
article in African Studies, 208, 224–5
and CATA, 225, 241, 243
fieldwork,
on Limba Separatist Church, 225,
232–3, 247, 252
in Middledrift, 22–3, 225, 227,
235–7, 239, 244–6, 248, 251–2
as mentor to Chris Hani, 226, 250–1
Monica
correspondence with, 33, 226, 234–5,
240, 242–5
influence on, 227, 230, 246, 252
opinion of each other, 206–7, 209,
218, 225
relationship with, 6–7, 21–2, 206,
208, 225–7, 231–5, 241, 243,
246, 249–52
and Non-European Unity Movement,
208, 225–6, 229–30, 235, 241,
243, 250
Index
obituaries, 226
Pemba as role model, 229–30
and Z.K. Matthews, 207, 236, 238,
241–2
Miller, Bice Creighton (Bis), 56–7
missionaries as interpreters, 8, 11, 298,
308
Mkele, Nimrod, 22, 208, 232–3, 260
Monica and Godfrey Wilson Papers,
26–34, 70, 79
Moore, Sally Falk, 257–8
Murdock, George, 25
correspondence with Monica, 289–91
Mwaikambo, John Brown, 159, 166, 173,
176, 181, 186–7
Mwaipopo, Chief, 143, 145–6, 172
Mwaisabile, Mwambenja, 181
Mwaisumo, Leonard, 15, 20–1, 159,
165–6, 173, 176
as author of ‘native texts’, 181–5, 188
conversion to Christianity, 166–8, 180
Godfrey,
as his research assistant, 131–2, 146,
150–1, 165–6, 168–74, 180–1,
184, 187
relationship with, 170, 174–5, 187–8
as informant, 173–5
as insider-outsider, 173, 183, 188
pursuit of literacy and multilingualism,
168–9, 176, 181
taking up appointment in appeal court
of senior chiefs, 162, 165, 185–7
working with Monica, 142, 145–6, 148,
154–5, 165–6, 173–4, 177–81,
184, 187, 189
National Council of Scientific Research
(NCSR), 260, 262, 273–4, 277
National Union of South African Students
(NUSAS), 235
Native Laws Commission of Enquiry
(Fagan Commission), 220, 223
New Brighton, 22, 228–30
fieldwork by Mqotsi, 225, 232–3, 247,
252
Njonjo, Charles, 222, 304
Nkonyeni, Archie, 259, 264, 272, 276
Non-European Unity Movement, 204,
208, 225–6, 229–30, 235, 241,
243, 250, 254, 259, 264, 276
Noruwana, Nomfundo, 267
Ntibane, 17, 73, 75–80, 98, 105, 112
Olivier, Lord, 55–6, 59
Osborn, Emily, 15–16
Peel, J.D.Y., 133
Pemba, George, 229–30
351
Philip, David, 303–4
Pile, Steve, 121
Pitje, Godfrey, 5, 208–10, 213–16, 226,
238, 260
as legal partner in Tambo and Mandela,
208, 214–15
his MA, 209–12
Monica
correspondence with, 33, 214–16
opinion of Pitje, 208–9, 212–13
relationship with, 6, 21, 208–10,
212–14, 216
Pondoland, 5, 6, 14, 17–18, 64, 69, 95, 99,
124, 139–40, 148, 157, 285, 315
Eastern, 85–7, 91–2
Western, 17, 73, 75–80, 98, 105, 112
exploring documentary sources, 286
letters from, 61, 78
relationships with African research
assistants, 5, 17, 38, 70, 227, 260
role of dreams, 19, 119
women, 61, 71, 75, 98, 112
see also East Bank; Ntibane
Poonyane, Sophonia, 165
Poto, Victor, 42, 73
Powdermaker, Hortense, 256–7
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 2, 10,
31, 220
Radloff, Ellen, 199
Raum, Otto, 239, 243
Reader, Desmond, 256
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), 67–8,
201, 213–14
Gluckman as director, 212–13
Godfrey as director, 130, 134–5, 193–4
Rhodes University College, 49, 201–2,
225, 227, 243–4, 249
Richards, Audrey, 13, 39, 60, 88, 201,
275, 277, 287–8, 306
correspondence with
Godfrey, 33, 129, 141
Monica, 33, 155–7, 161, 201–3, 220,
296, 300–1, 305–6
Roberts, John, 301
Roux, Edward Rudolph (Eddie), 17, 33,
38, 54–9, 65–6, 197
Monica
correspondence with, 33, 58, 197–8
influence on, 55–6, 59, 66
Royal Anthropological Institute, 219–20
Rubusana, Mrs, 18, 84, 90, 93, 98, 103–4,
106–8, 112, 115–16, 125
Rubusana, Walter Benson, 82, 90, 101–3
as Monica’s main facilitator in East
Bank, 18, 83–4, 90, 93–4, 97,
103, 106, 116
Ruffel, Miss, 46
352
Index
Sadek, Munira, 38, 52–5, 65
Sanjek, Roger, 14, 17, 67, 95
Schapera, Isaac, 2, 4, 10–12, 61, 70, 88,
165, 198, 202, 211, 294
Schumaker, Lyn, 5, 13–14, 67–8, 92, 142
‘the co-production of scientific
knowledge’, 23, 62, 68, 254–5
Sharp, John, 12, 23, 254, 258, 276
Simons, Jack, 259–60, 262, 273, 275, 277,
291, 294, 316
fieldwork in Langa, 259–60, 277, 291
Smith, Robert, 160
Smuts, Jan, 2, 88
Soga, John Henderson, 77
Soga, Mary Agnes (née Meikle), 75–6
Soga, Mary Agnes Buchanan see Dreyer,
Mary Agnes Buchanan (née
Soga)
Soga, Tiyo Burnside, 7, 75, 76
Soga, William Anderson, 75–6
South African Native College, Fort Hare
see Fort Hare Native College
Steinberg, Jonny, 2
Stewart, James, 39–40
Stubbs, Aelred, 221
Swana, Vuyiswa, 255, 267
Tambo, Oliver, 2, 208, 214–15, 237
Tawney, R.H., 301
Theal, George McCall, 45, 285, 292
Thompson, Leonard, 24, 291–6, 301, 306
Thornton, Robert, 29
Turner, Victor, 3, 5, 137
Tylor, Edward B., 119, 248–9
Tzatzoe, Jan, 7, 15, 163–4
University of Cape Town (UCT), 5
Mafeje Affair, 244, 253
Monica at, 5, 64–5, 217, 222, 226–7,
260–2, 273, 291, 315–16
urbanisation, 95, 100, 113, 117, 120
survival of belief in magic and
witchcraft, 119–21
waning of tribal influences, 110–12
Xhosa responses to, 95–7
vampires and magic, 120–1
Van der Horst, Sheila, 257, 260, 273, 294
Van Warmelo, Nicholas, 12, 164–5
Vansina, Jan, 291, 299–300
Vaughan, Megan, 15–17, 143–5, 163, 172,
181, 185
Vendler, Helen, 313
Walker, Eric, 45–6
Wedgwood, Camilla, 60–1
Wells, Major and Mrs, 144, 150, 152, 171
West, Martin, 5, 65
White, Luise, 120–1
Wilson, Francis, 5, 29–30, 33, 64, 116,
157, 194–5, 197–9, 218–19, 271,
295, 304, 316
Chiepe looking after, 199, 205–6
and father’s death, 199–200
interview with Monica, 59, 70, 145,
147, 177
Monica as mother, 200, 206
Wilson, Godfrey, 39, 58, 139, 142–3, 148,
177, 194, 199–201, 287
correspondence with Audrey Richards,
33, 129, 141
depression, 134, 136, 139–40, 194
as director of the RLI, 130, 134–5,
193–4
fieldnotes, 150–3, 159
influence of background on work,
140–1, 152
linguistic skills, 140–1, 143, 150–2, 155,
170, 172, 179, 188
Monica
as co-author, 1, 24, 130, 135–8, 156,
299
as co-worker at Bunyakyusa, 14,
19–21, 31, 95, 129, 134, 143,
160–1
correspondence with, 32, 140–1
Nyakyusa dictionary and grammar, 141,
144, 152, 177–8
relationship with informants, 148, 152,
174–5
in the South African Army, 135, 194
suicide, 3, 20, 130, 136, 155, 193–6,
199
as ‘an active presence’ after, 28–9,
157–8, 160–1, 199
Wilson, John Dover, 28, 140, 195–6, 222
Wilson, Mary Monica (née Hunter), 1,
4–5, 18–19, 38, 49, 70, 116–17,
142, 194, 220, 313–17
childhood, 40–5
at Lovedale Missionary School, 4, 17,
24, 38, 43–4, 66, 304
at Collegiate School for Girls, 27, 38,
45–6, 66
at Girton College, 4, 17, 25, 34, 38,
46–50, 52–65, 70, 76–7, 85,
91–3, 96, 118, 139, 284–5
at Fort Hare, 5, 7, 21, 155–6, 158, 193,
195, 197–8, 200, 203–5, 218–20,
222–3, 227, 231–4, 284–5
at Rhodes, 49, 201–2, 221, 225, 234
at UCT, 5, 64–5, 217, 222, 226–7,
260–2, 273, 291, 315–16
curiosity, 25, 38, 70
father’s influence, 27, 39–42, 47, 64–5
fieldwork, 3, 61, 78, 87, 91, 94
Index
checking verity of information, 311,
317
empirical method, 66, 70, 89, 95, 98,
311, 314, 317
implications of getting typewriter,
105–10, 118, 158–60
interest in dreams, 19, 118–23, 125–6
multi-sited approach, 17, 73, 144–5,
314
as observer rather than participant,
142, 158, 188, 285, 290
see also Auckland Village; Bunyakyusa;
Langa; Ntibane; Pondoland
fieldwriting, 99, 150–3
Cambridge way, 95–6, 147, 149,
152–3
contrasting urban life to rural
customs, 97, 110, 114, 125
gaps in material, 19, 99–100, 108–10,
113–15, 118
friendships, 44, 197
global reputation, 2–4, 89, 198, 256,
258
and Godfrey, 58, 177
as co-author, 1, 24, 130, 135–8, 156,
299
as co-worker, 14, 19–21, 31, 95, 129,
134, 143, 160–1
marriage, 141–3
suicide, 3, 20, 130, 136, 155–6,
193–6, 199
as ‘an active presence’ after his death,
28–9, 130
changing from Hunter to Wilson as
author, 156–7
coping after his death, 193, 195–200,
206
prioritising his work when writing up
their notes, 130–2, 138–9, 155,
160
at Hogsback, 41, 198–9, 200, 221
retirement to, 25, 28, 306
and history
of African societies uncovered through
anthropology, 283, 290–1, 296
and anthropology as one, 298–302,
306
broad interdisciplinary understanding
of, 302, 305–7
contribution to African, 3, 24, 203,
307
interest in, 27, 38, 44–6, 66, 284,
289–90, 294
opinion of contemporary historians,
301
Hodson’s influence, 17, 38, 62–4, 66,
71, 139, 147, 159
horse-riding, 41, 71, 79, 86, 317
353
importance of religion, 37–8, 43, 193
influence of missionary background and
schooling, 4, 7, 17, 37–8, 52–3,
64–5, 70, 98, 116, 143
and interpreters/research assistants, 6–8,
14, 17–25, 37–8, 73, 75, 78–80,
82–7, 89, 91–4, 97–8, 103–4,
107, 142, 145–6, 148, 154–5,
165–6, 173–4, 177–81, 184,
187, 189, 208–9, 212–14, 216,
226–7, 230–5, 241, 243, 246,
249–55, 258, 260–1, 268, 270–1,
274–8
knowledge of Xhosa language and
culture, 4, 18, 104
Lovedale
‘as a daughter of ’, 4, 7, 17, 24, 38, 47,
52–3, 64, 66, 70–1, 104, 116,
140, 142, 193, 203, 304
networks, 42, 82, 98, 103–4, 197,
304
and mother, 43, 46
as mother, 157, 194, 200, 206, 219
preservation of documents by, 26–7
on witchcraft, 249
publications, 2–3, 19–21, 24–5, 202,
298, 314
interdisciplinary and comparative
nature, 283–6
stressing historical dimension, 298
articles
‘An African Christian Morality’,
156–7
‘The Early History of the Transkei
and Ciskei’, 292
‘Effects of Contact with Europeans
on the Status of Pondo Women’,
115
‘In Pondoland’, 1
‘Mhlakaza prophète d’une apocalypse
en Afrique australe’, 301–2
‘Nyakyusa Age-Villages’, 219
‘The Re-Establishment of Yellowwood
Forest’, 306
‘The Study of African Society’, 150
books
African Systems of Kinship and
Marriage (contribution only),
220, 289
The Analysis of Social Change, 1, 25,
31, 129, 135–8, 149, 157, 194–6,
212, 219, 288–9
Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa, 3,
19–21, 25, 133–4, 136–9, 152,
160–1, 174, 219
For Men and Elders, 25, 133–4, 136,
216, 219, 298, 300
Freedom for My People, 222–3, 302–5
354
Index
Wilson, Mary Monica (née Hunter) (cont.)
Good Company, 3, 19–21, 25, 133–4,
136, 138–9, 148, 156–61, 173–4,
183, 219, 289
Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, 275,
217
Langa, 28, 37–8, 95, 253–4, 264–5,
267, 271–3, 275–7
acknowledgements, 255–6, 258–9,
262, 277
authorship, 226, 255–9, 267, 277
as creative dialogue and
co-production, 258, 275, 277
fieldwork by Mafeje, 23–4, 95, 125,
226, 253–6, 258–9, 264
Monica’s main contribution, 273–5
reviews, 256–7, 268
The Oxford History of South Africa, 24,
28, 203, 218, 283, 288–9, 292–7,
300–1, 304, 307
Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika
Corridor, 299
Reaction to Conquest, 2, 25, 28, 57, 64,
66, 69, 89, 95, 124, 138–9, 144,
219, 286, 298, 315
acknowledgements, 64, 73, 83, 85,
91–2
doctoral thesis, 76, 85, 91–3
reviews, 2, 89, 287
role of African assistants, 73, 75,
78–80, 82–7, 91
Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa,
3, 19–21, 25, 133–4, 136–9,
159–61, 174, 219
lectures
‘So truth be in the Field’, 19
‘The Thousand Years before Van
Riebeeck’, 297–8
papers
‘The Interpreters’, 308
‘Some Features of African
Urbanization in the Western
Cape’, 268
correspondence with
Archie Mafeje, 33, 255, 258, 267,
270, 278, 284
Audrey Richards, 33, 155–7, 161,
203, 220, 296, 300–1, 305–6
David Philip, 303–4
Desmond Clark, 303
Eddie Roux, 33, 197–8
father, 27, 32, 45–7, 55–7, 62, 140,
156, 158, 186
Francis Wilson, 33
Frieda Matthews, 221
George Murdock, 25, 289–91
Godfrey Wilson, 32, 140–1
Godfrey Pitje, 33, 214–16
J.E. Goldthorpe, 288
Leonard Thompson, 301
Livingstone Mqotsi, 33, 226, 234–5,
240, 242–5
Mary Dreyer, 79
Max Gluckman, 217, 219
mother, 33, 78, 80
Muriel Bradbrook, 301
Winifred Hoernlé, 87, 178, 180
letters from,
Bunyakyusa, 140
Fort Hare, 204
Girton College, 38–9, 46–52, 55–7,
62, 65
Pondoland, 61, 78
Wilson, Timothy (Tim), 29–30, 34, 194,
197–9, 219, 271, 303
Chiepe looking after, 199, 205–6
Wilson Collection see Monica and Godfrey
Wilson Papers
witchcraft and magic, 115, 180, 183, 187,
227, 236–7, 245–9
women and minorities, 10, 12–13, 61, 71,
75, 98, 112, 115–16, 148–9
as anthropologists, 10, 13, 60–1, 142
discrimination against in Cambridge,
49, 51
Wright, Marcia, 298–300
THE INTERNATIONAL AFRICAN LIBRARY
General Editors
j. d. y. peel, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
suzette heald, London School of Economics and Political Science
deborah james, London School of Economics and Political Science
The International African Library is a major monograph series from the International African Institute and complements its quarterly periodical Africa, the
premier journal in the field of African studies. Theoretically informed and culturally sensitive ethnographies and studies of social relations ‘on the ground’ have
long been central to the Institute’s publications programme. The IAL includes
works focused on development, especially on the linkages between the local and
national levels of society; studies in the social and environmental sciences; and
historical studies with social, cultural and interdisciplinary dimensions.
TITLES IN THE SERIES
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25
ISAK NIEHAUS: Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa
FRASER G. MCNEILL AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa
KRIJN PETERS War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone
INSA NOLTE Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: the local politics of a
Nigerian nationalist
BEN JONES Beyond the State in Rural Uganda
RAMON SARRÓ The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast:
iconoclasm done and undone
CHARLES GORE Art, Performance and Ritual in Benin City
FERDINAND DE JONG Masquerades of Modernity: power and secrecy in
Casamance, Senegal
KAI KRESSE Philosophising in Mombasa: knowledge, Islam and intellectual practice on the Swahili coast
DAVID PRATTEN The Man-Leopard Murders: history and society in colonial
Nigeria
CAROLA LENTZ Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana
BENJAMIN F. SOARES Islam and the Prayer Economy: history and authority in
a Malian town
COLIN MURRAY and PETER SANDERS Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho:
the anatomy of a moral crisis
R. M. DILLEY Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices Among Haalpulaar’en in
Senegal: between mosque and termite mound
BELINDA BOZZOLI Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid
ELISHA RENNE Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town
ANTHONY SIMPSON ‘Half-London’ in Zambia: contested identities in a Catholic
mission school
HARRI ENGLUND From War to Peace on the Mozambique–Malawi Borderland
T. C. MCCASKIE Asante Identities: history and modernity in an African village
1850–1950
24 JANET BUJRA Serving Class: masculinity and the feminisation of domestic service
in Tanzania
23 CHRISTOPHER O. DAVID Death in Abeyance: illness and therapy among the
Tabwa of Central Africa
22 DEBORAH JAMES Songs of the Women Migrants: performance and identity in
South Africa
21 BIRGIT MEYER Translating the Devil: religion and modernity among the Ewe in
Ghana
20 DAVID MAXWELL Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: a social history of the
Hwesa people c. 1870s–1990s
19 A. FIONA D. MACKENZIE Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952
18 JANE I. GUYER An African Niche Economy: farming to feed Ibadan, 1968–88
17 PHILIP BURNHAM The Politics of Cultural Difference in Northern Cameroon
16 GRAHAM FURNISS Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa
15 C. BAWA YAMBA Permanent Pilgrims: the role of pilgrimage in the lives of West
African Muslims in Sudan
14 TOM FORREST The Advance of African Capital: the growth of Nigerian private
enterprise
13 MELISSA LEACH Rainforest Relations: gender and resource use among the Mende
of Gola, Sierra Leone
12 ISAAC NCUBE MAZONDE Ranching and Enterprise in Eastern Botswana: a case
study of black and white farmers
11 G. S. EADES Strangers and Traders: Yoruba migrants, markets and the state in
northern Ghana
10 COLIN MURRAY Black Mountain: land, class and power in the eastern Orange
Free State, 1880s to 1980s
9 RICHARD WERBNER Tears of the Dead: the social biography of an African family
8 RICHARD FARDON Between God, the Dead and the Wild: Chamba interpretations
of religion and ritual
7 KARIN BARBER I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: oriki, women and the past in a
Yoruba town
6 SUZETTE HEALD Controlling Anger: the sociology of Gisu violence
5 GUNTHER SCHLEE Identities on the Move: clanship and pastoralism in northern
Kenya
4 JOHAN POTTIER Migrants No More: settlement and survival in Mambwe villages,
Zambia
3 PAUL SPENCER The Maasai of Matapato: a study of rituals of rebellion
2 JANE I. GUYER (ed.) Feeding African Cities: essays in social history
1 SANDRA T. BARNES Patrons and Power: creating a political community in metropolitan Lagos